Redd was staring at him. “You said the boy saw me shoot Tagert? That’s right?”
Chee nodded.
“You bastard,” Redd said. “No he didn’t.” He laughed. Relieved. Delighted.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I didn’t kill the son-of-a-bitch. I didn’t shoot Tagert. The boy couldn’t have seen that. I’ll bet he didn’t see a damned thing.”
“He saw you,” Chee said, but Redd wasn’t listening.
“I do believe this is going to work out after all,” Redd said, half to himself. He stepped over Tagert’s body, looked down at it.
“I’ll tell you why I should have shot him, though. Not for any five hundred dollars.” He poked Tagert’s shoulder with the toe of his boot. “For lots of money.”
The pistol was now pointed directly at Chee and Redd was looking at him over it.
“Do you know about the robbery? The one these two bandidos were running from?”
“A train robbery, I think. Up in Utah, wasn’t it?” Chee asked. But he was asking himself what Redd meant. That he hadn’t shot Tagert. If he hadn’t, who had?
“Right,” Redd said. “Not much money in it, and they lost most of that because the third man in the bunch was carrying it and he got shot. But the train was making stops at all the little post offices out here, stocking them up with stamps and stuff. There were just twenty or thirty silver dollars and some five-dollar gold pieces in the bag they had. But there were a dozen or so packages of stamps. You know what that means?”
Chee was remembering the stamp collector’s book he’d seen in Redd’s house.
“I’d guess it means a lot of money,” he said.
“A lot of money! Dozens of sheets of un-cancelled stamps. All kinds. I’m no stamp man but I looked some of them up. Five-cent William McKinleys worth like four hundred dollars for a block for four. Tencent Louisiana Purchase memorials worth eight hundred bucks for a block of four. Some of those one-centers worth over a hundred bucks apiece. I didn’t add it all up, but we’re talking about three or four hundred thousand dollars.”
“Lot of money,” Chee said, but he was thinking about whether the old pistol Redd was pointing at him would work, about how the hell to get out of here. And he must not have sounded properly impressed.
“It may not sound like much to you, with a regular job. But if you’re starving your way through graduate school, it sounds like a hell of a lot,” Redd said. “It sounds like an escape from never having a dime and doing slave labor for bastards like this one.”
“What was the problem, then? Did Tagert want to keep it all?”
Redd laughed. “He didn’t need money. He had it. He needed fame. And getting even with the other historians who don’t agree he’s God. No. He was going to leave it all here?just like I found it for him. Then he was going to call in the authorities. Most especially he was going to call in somebody important from the U.S. Post Office. He wanted official certification that this mailbag and all in it came off that Colorado and Southern train.”
“Oh,” Chee said. “I guess I see. He wanted a solid connection between these bodies here and that identification of Cassidy as the train robber. To make those other historians eat crow.”
“I think he’d found some sort of identification on the body. And he measured it. Can you believe that? Laid it out straight as he could and measured it. He said Cassidy was five foot nine inches and so was the mummy with the mustache. He said Cassidy had a scar under one eye. And two deep scars on the back of his head. He claimed he found those, too, but the thing’s so dried-up I couldn’t tell.”
“I say it would be safe to say he’s Cassidy without all that. How you going to prove it isn’t?”
“You don’t know historians,” Redd said. “And Tagert’s a single-minded bastard. I told him what it would do?if he called in the authorities. The Post Office would claim the mailbags, and the stamps. Face value of those stamps to them, maybe a hundred dollars, and we lose a fortune.”
“What did you want to do?”
“Split it,” Redd said. “Just split it. Fifty-fifty. That would be fair. After all, he never could have found it without me.”
Chee was thinking, How about thirds? How about Ashie Pinto sitting out there under his tree with his bottle? You wouldn’t have found anything without Pinto. But he said: “What did Tagert say?”
“He just sneered at me. Said I had made a deal for a thousand and I had five hundred coming out of that.”
“So you shot him?”
“I didn’t shoot him. I grabbed the mailbag and it turns out he had a pistol in his coat pocket. He pulled it out. Said he would shoot me if I didn’t leave things alone.” Chee watched Redd’s face register surprise at this manufactured memory. “You know, I think he would have done it too.”
Play along, Chee thought. Play along. “1 wouldn’t be surprised. What I’ve heard about him.”
Redd laughed. “No,” he said. “Talk about irony. Old Ashie shot him.”
Of course. And Nez, too. Lay the blame on old, drunk Ashie Pinto.
But Chee said: “Pinto. What’s ironic about that?”
After the first flurry, the snow had stopped. But now it began again, brushing Chee’s cheek with flakes and swirling them around the knees of Redd.
Redd had been thinking, not listening. Sorting things out in his mind. He motioned Chee with his pistol.
“Let me have your gun,” he said.
