He said, “Ain’t aiming to have a conversation. I’ve noticed, using way better Spanish, you can sometimes trick a suspect into an unwitting admission, or betraying guilty knowledge, by casually asking him something in his own mother tongue.”
So after she’d tongued him some while bouncing faster, and he’d returned the favor by rolling on top, Helga managed to teach him a few things that might come in handy if he was ever changing trains in that new Germanic Empire.
She said he tried too hard to gargle and spit, explaining most English speakers seemed to do that, even though nobody but those guttural Prussian Junkers really growled that much in High Dutch or Low.
He chuckled and asked, “You mean I could sound like a Prussian drillmaster if I put my gargles to it?”
She laughed and said he had his ramrod up the wrong way. Then she taught him how to snap “Achtung!” and suggested anyone who’d ever served Der Kaiser might be more inclined to pop to attention than a peaceful Mennonite. She had taught him some really dirty stuff to yell at folks by the time they just had to get some sleep.
He got enough to feel up to less pleasant chores by the time the good old gal had served him his breakfast in bed, and she tried not to cry as he got dressed and strapped on his gun ng. Neither one of them said anything about final good-byes as he kissed her at the head of those steep stairs and went on down them.
He made sure old Rocket had water in her trough, and promised he’d have her back out to the Lazy B as soon as he could. Then he headed up to the town hall.
As he entered Werner Sattler’s office, the older lawman asked what had taken him so blasted long. “We’re running out of time we can hold those safecrackers, Longarm. They’ve both been denying they ever even met that washerwoman or their two dead sidekicks.”
Longarm nodded and said, “We figured them for old cons. I’m sure the Founding Fathers never had real crooks in mind when they carved that Bill of Rights in stone. There’s a lot to be said for making us prove some damned charge or turning the rascals loose. But first things first.”
He got out the wad of telegrams, peeled off the list he’d penciled on the back of one after picking at half a dozen, and explained, “I was so long in getting back because they have a telegraph office up in McCook and I wired high and low. I only know a couple of the old boys I narrowed it down to on sight. I’d like you to go over these names and say who might look anything like your average deserter from that Kaiser’s cavalry. Did you know Junker comes from Jung Herr, or a young gentleman?”
Sattler snorted. “I thought it meant young lady. I know all the men I see on this penciled list. The only ones who’d fit Wolfgang von Ritter’s description can’t be him. Those wanted papers say the Prussian killer has been in this country less than ten years. Our few middle-aged gray-blond homesteaders of average height and wearing beards have all gotten that way by being here longer.”
Longarm frowned thoughtfully and pointed out, “I thought most of you Mennonites left the back steps of Russia around ‘73 or ‘74, at around the same time Wolf Ritter was fighting all those duels and mayhaps fixing to hop the same ship.”
Sattler said, “When I said here longer I meant here longer. Here in Kansas. That Prussian renegade fought other duels, or just shot men, all over this country while the rest of us were civilizing one particular part of Kansas. Nobody on this list is a new arrival. Why have you listed them to begin with?”
Longarm explained, “They’re old boys from around Sappa Crossing with money in the bank at the county seat. Your sheriff was proud to help the federal law with that, whether the county savings and loan was or not.”
Sattler said, “That’s no mystery. A lot of wheat growers buck their crops over there for sale. It’s easier to cash a check in any town you bank in. And you just agreed those two in the back were out to rob our one country bank.”
Longarm said, “I’d likely feel safer banking over to the county seat, across from the sheriff’s department, whether I’d come by the money one way or another. Let’s see if we can get Fingers Fawcett to help us out with Heger’s vault, seeing we can’t hold him much longer in any case.”
Sattler took a key ring from a wall hook and led the way, even as he protested it was a waste of time for them and too big a break for a known safecracker.
He said, “We know Horst Heger was given that money to pay off those rainmakers. You didn’t find it on them, did you?”
Longarm smiled wistfully at the image that conjured up as he said, “They didn’t have nothing on them, last I saw of them. They were fixing to hold a going-out-of-business sale. That means Heger never went near ‘em with that small fortune. Heger’s horse and shay wound up in another town entirely. But he never put toad squat in any bank at the county seat, and he’d have driven to McCook if he’d meant to take it with him aboard any railroad train.”
As Sattler jingled his keys along the corridor he insisted, “It would have been even dumber to leave the money in the vault at his shop and drive off to nowheres. I don’t know how those kid deputies got the notion they’d find money there when they let that ignorant washwoman talk them into using that dinamite juice the professionals had left with her.”
Longarm suggested they both ask. But when they got back to that patent cell and called the two crooks to the bars, neither one would admit he had any idea what they were talking about.
Longarm said, “Let’s try it another way. We need to get into that vault neither one of you knows anything about. it’s not nearly as tough a job as the bank vault you were interested in would have been. So we figure either one of you could crack it with one hand behind his back. Who’d like to spend another night in jail and who’d like to give it a try, with freedom to get way the hell out of these parts by sundown if he succeeds?”
From the way they both jumped at the offer Longarm suspected they could be sincere about never having heard of Heger’s fool vault.
Longarm chose Fingers as the one least likely to bust windows in town. Sattler let him out, locked the cell again, and said he’d catch up as soon as he rustled up a deputy to hold the fort there.
As Longarm and Fingers Fawcett walked the short distance to the missing gunsmith’s shop, the taller and younger deputy took advantage of the old crook’s friendlier attitude to ask his opinion on the grim mistakes those novice safecrackers had made the other night.
