times to work in secret and times you wanted a banker to level with you. So Longarm identified himself, but asked the banker, a Mr. Gordon Guthrie, not to spread it around.
The odd-looking but friendly enough Guthrie invited Longarm in, then locked the front door again before leading him into a back office. Longarm didn’t ask why. He knew everyone working there would have his or her own key, and regular banking hours hadn’t started yet.
Guthrie sat Longarm down at one side of his glass-topped desk, and offered him a handsome Havana Perfecto from a fancy case as he said Undersheriff Brennan had already warned them there could be a robbery in the offing.
Longarm asked Guthrie what they were planning to do about it as the banker lit them both up. Guthrie shook out the match, leaned back in his swivel chair, and blew some expensive smoke up toward the pressed-tin ceiling before he replied, “Nothing right now. We don’t have more than fifteen hundred dollars in cash on the premises this morning.”
Longarm enjoyed a drag of his own and replied, “Do tell? No offense, but it says out front, in gilt letters, that this bank has over eight million dollars in assets.”
Guthrie nodded and said, “Sure we do, in our main vaults in Kansas City. We keep as little portable wealth as possible out here in this country branch, for reasons you and Undersheriff Brennan recently refreshed my mind about.”
He waved the tip of his cigar expansively and elaborated. “We take in savings and cash checks in modest denominations most of the month. The only time money changes hands in large amounts here in Minnipeta Junction would be on or about the end of the month, when folks pay off their help and their bills. We seldom cash a check for more than a hundred dollars, but come the end of the month, we have to keep at least twenty grand on hand here.”
Longarm didn’t need the calendar on one wall to tell him they had about a week’s leeway. He asked how all that working capital moved across the prairie between the Junction and the main branch in the big city.
Guthrie sounded confident as he replied, “By Pinkerton. The Eye That Never Sleeps guards us and all our assets under a yearly retainer. Come next Saturday they’ll start out from K.C. with the strongboxes under heavy guard. They’ll freight them in with one Pink assigned to each strongbox with a ten-gauge and two S&W double-action revolvers. Undersheriff Brennan tells us the gang we’re worried about usually strikes with three men and a girl.”
Longarm nodded soberly and explained. “The gal acts as an advance scout and mastermind. For all we know for certain, she’s already come by to cash a small check and do some scouting. If she decided you were as big a boo for as little profit As you seem, she might have already written off this particular bank. How come you call yourself a Minnipeta bank if you’re only a branch, by the way?”
Guthrie explained, “Country folks like to feel you’re paying attention to them. It costs about the same no matter what the gold leaf on the glass might read. So all our branches are named for the one-horse town they serve. Why do you ask? Do you find that important?”
Longarm shrugged and said, “You already explained why it reads out front that you carry more cash on you than you really do. I don’t care how you run your bank. But I have to consider it from the way it might or might not look to Miss Medusa Le Mat, the advance scout and mastermind I just mentioned. She might have been told one thing by one of your neighborhood crooks, the mysteriously missing Buster Crabtree. She might have scouted what she took to be a prosperous, privately run country bank, found out as much about you as I just did, no offense, and decided to pass you by. That might explain some missing pieces of this puzzle. It’s tough to make ‘em fit any pattern when they ain’t on the table.”
Guthrie accused Longarm of confusing him just for fun. So Longarm said, “I ain’t trying to talk mysteriously. I sometimes forget others might be listening when I’m talking to myself about matters I’ve been over more than once.”
He took a thoughtful drag to gather his words, let it out, and said, “A bank robber who just hits banks willy-nilly is sure to hit the wrong bank sooner or later, as the James-Younger gang found out that time in Northfield. So Miss Medusa Le Mat takes more time than most to make sure she and her recruits know just what they’re up to. She lines up the bank, picks a nearby hideout, and stocks up on plenty of sudden horseflesh before she hits, hard and deadly, as you’ve likely heard from Pat Brennan.”
Guthrie nodded soberly and said, “If they hit us come payday, they may find a warmer reception than usual. The Pinkerton Agency will be sending extra guards with the money this time.”
Longarm said, “Miss Medusa Le Mat may have figured as much. I had me a long conversation last night with … someone who knows these parts better than me. We’re surrounded by miles of nothing much but grass, cows, and scattered spreads. This, ah, local informant I just mentioned figures there’s less than three hundred souls, all told, within a hard lope of this here bank.”
Guthrie asked what his point might be.
Longarm said, “It’s easy to lose track of folks in a crowd even when it ain’t too crowded. But they’re either hiding stick as hell, or they ain’t there. Buster Crabtree and that soiled dove who dropped out of sight last payday were well known, at least by sight, to most of the folks in and about the junction. So where are they at?”
Guthrie said he had no idea.
Longarm said, “I know Miss Medusa Le Mat on sight. She shot me at point-blank range recently. I’ve made up a short list of new gals in these parts. Checking out your town whores ought to be easy. What can you tell me about a widow woman called Rose Cassidy, said to breed and sell cow ponies on a small spread off to the east of the Junction?”
Guthrie said, “She banks with us, of course. She and her grown daughter, Maureen, just moved up here from Texas and bought the old Nesbit place for cash. We held the mortgage. We were glad to unload a hundred sixty acres of foolishness at a fair price. I naturally handled the sale, and I felt obliged to warn her the Nesbits had gone bust trying to plow chalk and flint with a worn-out John Deere moldboard. She said she’d made out better breeding ponies for the cattle trade down Texas way, and meant to do better up this way now that beef prices were up and the Indians were out of the way.”
Longarm asked what the ladies from Texas might look like.
Guthrie confided, “Not bad, neither mother nor daughter. They look more like sisters, Rose Cassidy being well preserved.”
Longarm said, “I wasn’t planning on courting either of ‘em. I asked what they looked like.”
