Constable Payne arrested her on a charge of theft of service, and that would have cost her thirty days in the county jail if that had been the end of it.”
Constance sat up on one elbow to stare down at him with a puzzled smile as she clung to his organ-grinder, asking, “But didn’t you say everyone thought she was Bunny McNee?”
Longarm shook his head and said, “An eager kid deputy called Nate Rothstein thought the prisoner in the back might be the notorious Bunny McNee. The older and wiser Constable Payne knew better, whether he ever got any from her or not. But Nate Rothstein saw a resemblance to an outlaw with considerable paper hanging on him. The real Bunny McNee would be worth over a thousand dollars in various bounties, and I know for a fact that old Amos Payne was drawing less than five hundred dollars a year and had expensive habits.”
She gasped. “You mean he knew, but hoped to collect some reward money before anyone was any the wiser? But Custis how would he get a wayward girl to go along with the charade long enough for him to collect even half that bounty money?”
Longarm dryly answered, “How else? He made a deal with her, of course. He told the desperately broke gal that he’d cut her in on the bounty money if she’d play at being Bunny McNee until he could collect it. The deal was for her to go through the whole charade, as you put it, stoutly maintaining her innocence and denying she was the real Bunny McNee whilst everyone winked, nudged, and paid off on the lying little rascal. But of course, once the bounties had been paid, and before she served any real time …”
“She only had to open her shirt and drop her jeans!” The naked lady in bed with him laughed.
Longarm said, “Yep. That was the plan. Then they heard Billy Vail was sending me instead of the original deputies assigned the chore. I don’t like to brag. But I’ve been in the papers more than Smiley and Dutch from my home office. So Payne panicked. He figured I was chosen because I knew something. Likely something as simple as what the real Bunny McNee looked like. Payne couldn’t confide in his kid deputies. None of them knew what he and the gal in the back had been planning. But he’d somehow met up with Ginger Bancott, who might have been bribing an underpaid lawman not to notice he was up this way. At any rate, he got in touch with the killer and they made yet another deal. I was saved by the simple fact that they only had a description to go by and that English civil engineer you’d hired sort of fit it.”
She gasped, “Oh, Lord, poor Gaylord! Nobody ever shot him to keep him from working for me! They shot him because they thought he was you! But wait a second, dear, didn’t Constable Payne shoot Ginger Bancott for shooting you—I mean Gaylord?”
Longarm nodded curtly and said, “To silence and collect on him! I hope you’ve grasped by now that a man who’d mess with a pal’s wife and put in for bounty money under false pretenses is hardly a paragon of virtue!”
She lay back down and began stroking again as she replied, “I suppose not. He sounds awfully wicked. Who was that married woman you mentioned? Was I right about Prunella Thalman?”
Longarm chuckled and said, “I don’t talk about ladies who’ve done me no harm. The one they had locked up in that patent cell got all spooked after guns commenced to go off all around her. So she wanted out. She likely told old Amos she did before she wrote me a desperate message saying she was ready to talk.”
Constance asked, “Was that when somebody came to break out someone who they took to be Bunny McNee? Wait a moment. That won’t work if her own pals knew she wasn’t him, and the real Bunny McNee’s pals were nowhere around here!”
Longarm hugged her closer and said, “You ought to be their new constable. Nobody was out to bust her out. Amos Payne had to shut her up. But she was locked up for the night, guarded by a kid called Tim Keen. But Amos was his boss. So Tim naturally opened up and went back to the cell block with him when he offered some fool excuse for seeing the prisoner. Once the three of them were alone back there, Amos Payne simply drew his .45 short and shot Tess Jennings and Tim Keen in cold blood. But his twenty eight grains of powder hadn’t done a tough kid all the way in yet. So as Constable Payne turned to dash out into the dark so’s he could come running the other way a few moments later, the boy he’d put on the floor got his own gun out and blazed away with his .45 long. The more powerful fire blew the front door open as well. So the picture we found as the smoke was clearing fit together wrong. I might have been smarter, sooner, if those other crooks hadn’t been throwing their own grit in my eyes. Nobody involved had all that much common sense. But I’ve noticed in the past how two dumb rascals, working at cross-purposes, can make a confounded lawman think he’s up against something really slick, and speaking of slick, you’re fixing to get that hand all slick and wet if you don’t let me put the fool thing where it wants to finish!”
So she let him, and it felt so good he decided he might as well come in her again.
Chapter 19
Sometime later down in Denver, Longarm watched and waited in Billy Vail’s office as the crusty old cuss took forever to read a lot more paper than Longarm had ever handed in. Vail finally lowered it to his cluttered desk, snorted blue smoke at the younger man seated across from him in the oak-paneled back room, and declared, “I am mad as hell and you’d better not never do it again. But fair is fair, and had Smiley and Dutch gone up yonder to transfer that fool female prisoner, we might have wound up looking awfully silly. That crooked lawman never would have ordered them killed, nobody would have felt the need to kill that runaway wife and the kid deputy, and she’d have let us put her on trial and convict her before she just laughed in our faces and bared a pair of tits the real Bunny McNee has never been accused of having!”
Longarm cocked a brow and asked, “We know that much about the late Tess Jennings now?”
Vail nodded his bullet head. “You didn’t. I was the one who finally trailed her back to Arkansas on paper. She ran off on a hog farmer and two bitty kids with a tinhorn gambler who might or might not have been the drifter who stranded her up in John Bull. Forget about her. This wicked world is as well off without the likes of her and that two-faced housemaid who almost got you killed.”
Vail blew more smoke out both nostrils and added, “Thanks to the way some deputies from this office like to duck out on paperwork, that new young Constable Rothstein is taking the credit for solving both their murders in an election year.”
Longarm shrugged and replied, “Hell, I’d have had to go back for the trials of them cattle thieves if I’d been any less generous with old Nate. May I please light my own smoke?”
Vail snapped, “No. I told you that was an order and I meant it. That’ll learn you to spill tobacco ash on my rug and grind it in with a boot heel, as if I wasn’t watching!”
He glared down at the papers on his desk and said, “Where was I? Oh, right, you say in your report to me that you’re only alleging a mess of stuff instead of charging it because none of it seemed to be federal and you didn’t know how the locals wanted to phrase some of it to the newspapers.”
Longarm shrugged. “Like I said, I had no call to get myself embroiled in a stupid shouting match. All the really
