Arkansas Assault

Chicago; the finest linen shirts and cravats; and French cuffs adorned with large 24 carat gold cuff links that bore the heads of the Caesars. It was easy to see that he was hard of hearing. Despite his imposing presence, he had to tilt his head to the right to hear well and even then he lost a good deal of what was said.

“You seem very satisfied with yourself,” Tillman said.

“Well, things turned out all right.”

“You think so?”

It was easy to sense that Noah Tillman wasn’t going to turn the other cheek in this particular moment. He was going to confront Ekert and Ekert was just now realizing it.

“I pay you three times what you made before you went to work with me.”

“Yessir.” Nervousness in Ekert’s voice now.

“And when your mother was sick in Kansas last year, I let you take a full month off.

“And when your son took sick, I paid all the expenses at the Denver hospital.”

“Yessir.”

“I feel I’ve been loyal to you, Mr. Ekert.” He had started to play with his left cuff link. To cover it with his thumb and then rub it, as if the rubbing would produce a magical occurrence—a secret door sliding open, a genie in cowboy get-up suddenly appearing.

“Yessir, you’ve been very loyal to me, Mr. Tillman.”

“But now when I ask you to perform a simple task for me, you let me down.”

“Sir, as I told you, we killed the girl so she won’t be any trouble—”

“Yes, Mr. Ekert, you killed the girl all right. But that’s not the end of it.”

“It’s not?”

Tillman made a displeased face and sat back in his baronial leather chair. “A few minutes ago you sat there looking so smug, I wanted to slap you across the face.”

“I didn’t mean to look smug, Mr. Tillman.”

“Think, Ekert.” Tillman tapped his right temple. “Think it through. You’re not a stupid man.”

“Thanks for saying that, sir.”

“So sit there and think about it. There’s unfinished business here, Mr. Ekert. Business that could bring this whole thing down.”

“There is, sir?”

“Yes, Mr. Ekert. There is. Now I’m going to walk over there and get myself a brandy. And when I come back here, I want you to have your answer ready. All right?”

“Yessir.”

Ekert did his best to smile but couldn’t quite make it.

9

After Fargo told her about himself, Liz Turner told the Trailsman an interesting story, one that held elements of a late night campfire ghost tale.

Looking back through the Clarion files accumulated before she and her husband came to Tillman, she saw four stories over fourteen years that said basically the same thing. Eight travelers were reported missing over these years and the relatives of each one eventually ended up here in Tillman, insisting that their loved ones were last seen alive right here.

The funny thing was, Stan Tillman, Noah’s cousin, who had been sheriff before Tom, claimed not to have known anything about the disappearances. When Liz had confronted him with these stories, Stan said that these loved ones had to blame somebody for their relatives vanishing. Family troubles of various kinds was why these folks had vanished of their own free will.

When they’d first come here, Liz and Richard had paid the Tillmans the same homage that everybody else did. They walked wide of writing any stories that were in any way critical of the family. The newspaper thrived. Noah Tillman personally saw to it. They accommodated him in every single public dispute, even at those times when Noah Tillman was clearly acting illegally and being a bully to get his way.

Until the incident with the card game.

One of Noah’s nephews had played twelve beery hours of poker one night and lost a lot more money than he could afford. The man he lost it to was a friend of his. Or had been until this game. The nephew got so angry that the friend even offered to return his winnings. He valued the friendship too much to lose. But the nephew only scoffed. He didn’t want money, he said. He just wanted a chance to win his money back. After half an hour of browbeating, the friend finally agreed to play double or nothing, though he accurately predicted what would happen.

The nephew would play double or nothing, highest card draw, and lose. Then he’d owe twice as much money. And demand that they play again. And all the friend wanted to do was quit and go home. He was tired. He had to work in the morning.

The nephew persisted. They went five times for double or nothing and the nephew lost every time. The entire saloon of early morning stragglers watched it all with grim humor. The barkeep tried to close up for the night but the nephew said he’d be sorry if he did. The barkeep didn’t want to take on a Tillman. That was for sure.

The upshot of all this was that the friend was found in the morning with the back of his head smashed in and his money gone.

Most folks assumed that the nephew had followed the friend home and killed him on a deserted, moonlit road.

Wrong, according to Sheriff Stan Tillman.

What happened, he insisted, was that the friend had been drunk and had fallen off his horse backwards, thus injuring the back of his head.

There were any number of things wrong with this claim. There was no rock or boulder on the roadside to cause such damage. Even if there were, to fall off the horse in the way the lawman claimed would have been a highly unlikely fluke. Men falling from horses tend to go head first or sideways, rarely backwards. And the crushed skull itself had been pretty obviously done with a weapon or tool of some kind. Accidental injuries wouldn’t have been as deftly and thoroughly placed. Or been inflicted several times.

All the good journalistic instincts of Liz and Richard Turner took over. They just couldn’t let this one go by. They began interviewing people who’d been at the saloon that night. They walked through the entire episode as laid out by Sheriff Stan. Then they hired an out of town doc with a degree from back east to come to Tillman to investigate the whole matter. It was his conclusion that it was very unlikely that the friend had died in the manner Sheriff Stan insisted he did.

The Turners published their story. What was said wasn’t as important as what wasn’t said. While the story didn’t come right out and say that the nephew, a notoriously sore loser, had killed his friend, you could certainly read the story that way.

And that was the way most Clarion readers chose to read it, too. For the first time the House of Tillman had been challenged. And everybody knew it.

The Turners had several great follow-up stories ready to go, each one more damning than the others about how Tillman law and order worked just fine for the Tillmans but not for anybody else.

But before they could go to press, the newspaper office was burned to the ground during the night.

And a night after that, their house was torched. They’d barely been able to escape.

Sheriff Stan was retired within two months. The Turners rebuilt their house and the newspaper office. And for a long time, clearly intimidated, they had nothing unfavorable to say about the Tillman empire. They were ashamed of themselves, but shame was better than death. And they had no doubt that old Noah would kill them if he saw a need to.

But when the story about the missing travelers came up—and they checked back through past newspapers— they became suspicious. Richard began investigating. And, not long after, was backshot and killed.

Liz finished her coffee and said, “And now there’s the girl you found dead. And her missing brother.”