“I could stand a drink.”
The two men stood and turned to leave the lobby. Their attention was caught, though, by a breathless messenger running in to ask the hotel clerk if he’d seen the night patrolman.
“Not for half an hour or so—why?”
“Because there’s been another killing, that’s why,” the young man puffed. “The worst yet. It’s the police chief himself that’s been shot this time.”
The distraught fellow bent over for a moment to gulp for breath, then turned and dashed back out into the night. “Aw, shit,” Longarm mumbled. He shook his head. “Reckon we better put that drink off till later, Mr. Colton.”
“Yes, I expect we should at that.”
Chapter 34
Longarm and “Lester Colton” made the steep climb to the top floor of City Hall in record time. They found the expected scene of confusion there with virtually every cop on the force—there weren’t really all that many, one night man, two day officers and a part-time relief officer who worked weekends and the occasional day off for the others—getting in each other’s way along with Ranger Sergeant George Braxton and a handful of civilians who no doubt worked for, or anyway drew pay from, the town.
In his role as an interested spectator Amos couldn’t say much, and he tried to fade into the woodwork as much as possible while Longarm stepped into the middle of things.
At that middle was the focus of all the fuss and feathers, namely the very dead body of Police Chief J. Michael Bender. The man had changed to fresh clothing since Longarm last saw him—something without brush scrapes and grass stains—and was dotted here and there with a salve to heal the scratches he’d gotten from Mrs. Deel’s lilacs. Not that he need have bothered. There was a dark-purple depression in the center of his forehead. The dime-sized hole was surrounded by a black ring where burning gunpowder had scorched the skin. Apart from that little flaw, though, Bender looked pretty good. His hair was not even mussed. He was still at his desk, seated in his chair almost normally, though slumped back into a more relaxed posture than he had allowed himself in life. There wasn’t any great secret about the way the man died. He’d been sitting peacefully at his desk, expecting no difficulties, and then he was shot at virtually point-blank range.
The dead man’s eyes were open, which Longarm always found a mite disconcerting. Since no one else seemed inclined to do it, Longarm went around behind the desk and pushed his eyes shut. They stayed closed without having to be weighted or sewn, which Longarm considered something of a small blessing. He hated it when you couldn’t make the eyes remain closed.
Brass Braxton looked at Longarm, opened his mouth as if to protest, and then thought better of it. Which Longarm thought damned odd. The sergeant was not a shy fellow and would almost certainly want to take over this investigation himself.
Something else occurred to Longarm, though, that was of more immediate interest than thinking about the actions and reactions of a stray Ranger sergeant. When he’d touched Bender the man had felt downright warm. He put his fingertips on Bender’s throat and confirmed that fleeting impression. The body had barely begun to cool.
“Did anybody hear the shot?” he asked of no one in particular.
Since no one volunteered an answer, he selected the uniformed cop whom he recognized as the regular night officer and repeated the question to him.
“No, sir. Not that we know about.”
“Any idea as to time of death then?”
“Yes, sir, we pretty much know when it has to’ve been.”
“Care to explain that, officer?”
“Yes, sir. The chief’s habit is … was, that is … to come in every night at ten. Never failed to do that, sir, not as long as I’ve been on the payroll. I never knew him to be late and he wasn’t often more than five or ten minutes early. He always checked the incident log”—the young officer pointed to a large leather ledger book that lay on a counter at the side of the room—“and had a word with the night duty officer before he’d go home and go to bed. Every night including weekends he did that.”
“And tonight?”
“The night officers know his routine, of course. We always come up between ten and ten-fifteen. Tonight I got here about ten or eleven minutes past the hour. That’s when I found the chief, just like you see him now.”
“So he was killed between 9:50 and, say, 10:12,” Longarm said.
“Yes, sir. And by somebody he knew, of course, which I guess you can see for yourself. I mean, he was sitting down at his desk. He wasn’t alarmed, wasn’t worried about nothing. Whoever killed him just walked right over to him and opened up right in his face.”
“Uh-huh, I … Sergeant, what’s that you have there?”
Braxton broke into a half-trot for the door, then realized his error and stopped, turning and trying to look casual and unconcerned. He was somewhat too late for that, however. The man was caught red-handed—and red-faced too. At least he did have the good grace to blush about it. He was standing there holding a pair of ledger books, neither of these quite so fancy as the official police log book. One was a large, canvas-bound volume of the sort often found in public agencies, the other a smaller paperbound book.
“May I see what you were about to walk out with?” Longarm asked in a deceptively pleasant tone of voice.
He held his hand out and started across the room.
Brass Braxton looked once again like he would much rather run than stand still.
Chapter 35
