Fingers insisted he’d never met the late Brunhilda Maier, but he volunteered that if he was a kid led astray by a wicked older woman who might have somehow got hold of some nitroglycerine, you weren’t supposed to use that much of it, and you never held any loose in any bottle within a good fifty yards from any loud noises. The old con confided, “I’ve never liked to work with juice. If those awful crooks you keep asking me about were in town to bust into the bank, they only had that nitroglycerine along, in a sealed, totally filled bottle on a bed of cotton batting, as a last resort. The smart way is always the easy, least noisy way possible.”
They got to the shop and simply stepped through the front window, seeing some damned kids had pried off half the boards. Once inside the gloomy shop, Finger sniffed and asked, “Jesus, what’s that stink? It reminds me of this job I backed out of back East once I saw what the mastermind wanted me to do.”
Longarm said, “Tell me about it later. The vault’s this way.”
Werner Sattler caught up with them in the blood-spattered chamber as Fingers was gingerly working the combination with one ear pressed to the steel while Longarm held a lantern high for him. When the town law asked what they were doing, Longarm warned, “Hush a minute so he can listen for the tumblers to click inside.”
Sattler nodded and watched silently as the experienced old crook paused, wiping his sweaty fingertips on the front of his shirt, and said, “That’s three. There’s usually four to be fiddled for in this brand of lock. Let me get this old heart settled down. Like I was saying, this reminds me of the time I was recruited to open such a combination lock, leading into a family crypt. Seems they’d just put this old lady to rest with all her diamonds on, but I said no as soon as I literally got wind of what they wanted. You sure this gunsmith who ran off with all that money really ran off, Longarm?”
The lawman who’d recruited him said, “Stop stalling. Let’s open her up and see for ourselves.”
So Fingers got back to work and they did. The stench was incredible as the tight steel door swung open, and old Fingers ran into the kitchen to vomit out the back door. Werner Sattler just covered his mouth with a kerchief and stared goggled-eyed as Longarm raised the lantern higher for a better look at the horror that had been locked away for safekeeping all this time.
He soberly said, “You’d know better than me if that was the suit Heger was wearing the last time anybody saw him alive. I don’t envy your coroner, and if it’s all the same with you, I aim to let the undertaker stuck with moving him find out just how much money he has on him.”
Chapter 1 7
But the local part-time undertaker said he’d never had to deal with a such a verfault cadaver, which was High Dutch for anyone left unembalmed that long in warm weather with no ventilation.
The dead gunsmith had burst his store-bought duds at the seams as he’d swollen up like that over a period of around a week. So it wasn’t too tough to haul his duds out of the vault a yard or so at a time. There was usually a dry end to grab hold of. There wasn’t any money to be found, in his pockets or in the soggy puddle of stinky body fluids left when they finally managed to scoop the half-naked form out on some planking to be covered with a tarp and carried away.
Later on, at the hearing held at the town hall, their part-time deputy coroner showed he was made of sterner stuff by declaring the late Horst Heger had died of gunshot wounds, a heap of gunshot wounds from .40-caliber to number-nine buck.
When it was Helga Pilger’s turn, she said she couldn’t say when all that gunfire had transpired because she’d never heard any shots.
When an old geezer on the panel implied she’d have had to be stone deaf, or in league with the shootist, to miss the dulcet sounds of four pistol shots and a shotgun blast from her quarters above the carriage house, Helga began to cry. So Longarm stood up and called out, “I know it ain’t my turn. But nobody in that part of town heard any gunshots during the seventy-odd hours the deed could have been done!”
Someone asked if he was suggesting that the LeMat had been fitted with something to muffle the sounds of its fusillade.
Longarm shook his head and said, “Inventors keep trying to come up with a muzzle silencer. So far nobody has, and I doubt one would be much help with either a shotgun or revolver in any case. So here’s what I think happened.”
They dismissed Helga and told him to take her place if he felt so smart. After he’d done so, Longarm said, “I can’t say whether Heger did so before or after you-all gave him that money to pay off those so-called Ruggles sisters. But along the way he recognized a wanted killer he’d once met up with in that spike-hatted army of Bismarck or his kaiser. It’s been made to appear that it was when the notorious Wolf Ritter showed up on his doorstep with his notorious LeMat revolver. I ain’t sure that’s what happened. From all we know of Ritter, he’s too slick and too rich to put such a giveaway on the market. I think he found out Heger had recognized him and wired my boss, Marshal Billy Vail, that he was somewhere in these parts, pretending to be somebody less disgusting in these parts.”
A cowhand who’d drifted in for the free show exclaimed, “Hot damn! I see what happened! This Ritter cuss came in late at night with that swamping gun, killed the gunsmith with it, stuffed the body in that vault, and put the murder weapon in the window, like it was on sale, as he just walked off with all that money!”
Longarm said, “No offense, but that don’t work. Remember the real Wolf Ritter, if he’s in these parts at all, wouldn’t want it known he was. After that, not being a Mennonite, he’d have had little call to know a clannish inner circle of wheat growers and town fathers, no offense, had gathered that dry harvest weather fund. I’m the law and I’ve yet to get exact numbers as to just how much Heger may or may not have had on him when a party or parties unknown killed him, not in his shop but somewhere more private. There’s a whole lot of open range all around, and those Ruggles sisters and their sky bombs would have excused any distant shotgun blasts.”
The deputy coroner brightened and exclaimed, “I see it all now! After he’d killed and robbed poor Heger, Wolfgang von Ritterhoff smuggled the body into town, hid his body in the vault, and left the murder weapon in the window so that nobody would find it on him if he was questioned, ja?”
“Nein,” said Longarm. “The real Ritter wouldn’t want to be suspected, whether he’d killed and robbed a soul or not. From his recent moves we know about, he’s not getting any younger and he’d been trying to control his temper and settle down, not advertise. So suppose the late Horst Heger confided in a false friend he trusted, a Mennonite brother who’d know about all the money in that vault. What if he got Heger alone somewheres, an easier chore for a false friend than it might have been for an outlaw Heger had spotted around Sappa Crossing, and forced him to give the combination to his vault before killing him with another LeMat entirely and simply smuggling the body back into town under cover of darkness to rob the vault, hide the body, and leave the LeMat in the window at a price assuring it would stay there until somebody smart enough to make the connection came along.”
The coroner gasped, “Donnerwetter! You mean to say one of our own set out to abgekarteten, I mean frame
