Continental Op Stories · Corkscrew (3/9)

VI

An hour later we were dismounting in front of the Border Palace, going indoors.

A long, thin, blanket-wrapped body lay on two tables that had been pushed together. Half the citizens of Corkscrew were there. Behind the bar, Chick Orr’s battered face showed, hard and watchful. Gyp Rainey was sitting in a corner, rolling a cigarette with shaky fingers that sprinkled the floor with tobacco crumbs. Beside him, paying no attention to anything, not even looking up at our arrival, Mark Nisbet sat.

“By God, I’m glad to see you!” Bardell was telling me, his fat face not quite so red as it had been the day before. “This thing of having men killed at my front door has got to stop, and you’re the man to stop it!”

I noticed that the Circle H.A.R. men had not followed me into the center of the room, but had stopped in a loose semicircle just inside the street door.

I lifted a flap of the blanket and looked at the dead man. A small hole was in his forehead, over his right eye.

“Has a doctor seen him?” I asked.

“Yes,” Bardell said. “Doc Haley saw him, but couldn’t do anything. He must have been dead before he fell.”

“Can you send for Haley?”

“I reckon I can.” Bardell called to Gyp Rainey, “Run across the street and tell Doc Haley that the deputy sheriff wants to talk to him.”

Gyp went gingerly through the cowboys grouped at the door and vanished.

I didn’t like this public stuff. I’d rather do my questioning on the side. But to try that here would probably call for a showdown with Peery and his men, and I wasn’t quite ready for that.

“What do you know about the killing, Bardell?” I began.

“Nothing,” he said emphatically, and then went on to tell me what he knew. “Nisbet and I were in the back room, counting the day’s receipts. Chick was straightening the bar up. Nobody else was in here. It was about half-past one this morning, maybe.

“We heard the shot⁠—right out front, and all run out there, of course. Chick was closest, so he got there first. Slim was laying in the street⁠—dead.”

“And what happened after that?”

“Nothing. We brought him in here. Adderly and Doc Haley⁠—who lives right across the street⁠—and the Jew next door had heard the shot, too, and they came out and⁠—and that’s all there was to it.”

I turned to Gyp.

He spit in a cuspidor and hunched his shoulders.

“Bardell’s give it all to you.”

“Didn’t see anything before or after except what Bardell has said?”

“Nothin’.”

“Don’t know who shot him?”

“Nope.”

I saw Adderly’s white mustache near the front of the room, and I put him on the stand next. He couldn’t contribute anything. He had heard the shot, had jumped out of bed, put on pants and shoes, and had arrived in time to see Chick kneeling beside the dead man. He hadn’t seen anything Bardell hadn’t mentioned.

Dr. Haley had not arrived by the time I was through with Adderly, and I wasn’t ready to open on Nisbet yet. Nobody else there seemed to know anything.

“Be back in a minute,” I said, and went through the cowboys at the door to the street.

The Jew was giving his joint a much-needed cleaning.

“Good work,” I praised him; “it needed it.”

He climbed down from the counter on which he had been standing to reach the ceiling. The walls and floor were already comparatively clean.

“I not think it was so dirty,” he grinned, showing his empty gums, “but when the sheriff come in to eat and make faces at my place, what am I going to do but clean him up?”

“Know anything about the killing last night?”

“Sure, I know. I am in my bed, and I hear that shot. I jump out of my bed, grab that shotgun, and run to the door. There is that Slim Vogel in the street, and that Chick Orr on his knees alongside him. I stick my head out. There is Mr. Bardell and that Nisbet standing in their door.

“Mr. Bardell say, ‘How is he, Chick?’

“That Chick Orr, he say, ‘He’s dead enough.’

“That Nisbet, he does not say anything, but he turn around and go back into the place. And then comes the doctor and Mr. Adderly, and I go out, and after the doctor looks at him and says he is dead, we carry him into Mr. Bardell’s place and put him on those tables.”

That was all the Jew knew. I returned to the Border Palace. Dr. Haley⁠—a fussy little man whose nervous fingers played with his lips⁠—was there.

The sound of the shot had awakened him, he said, but he had seen nothing beyond what the others had already told me. The bullet was a .38. Death had been instantaneous.

So much for that.

I sat on a corner of a pool table, facing Mark Nisbet. Feet shuffled on the floor behind me and I could feel tension making.

“What can you tell me, Nisbet?” I asked.

He didn’t look up from the floor. No muscle moved in his face except those that shaped his mouth to his words.

“Nothing that is likely to help,” he said, picking his words slowly and carefully. “You were in in the afternoon and saw Slim, Wheelan, Keefe and I playing. Well, the game went on like that. He won a lot of money⁠—or he seemed to think it was a lot⁠—as long as we played poker. But Keefe left before midnight, and Wheelan shortly after. Nobody else came in the game, so we were kind of short-handed for poker. We quit it and played some high-card. I cleaned Vogel⁠—got his last nickel. It was about one o’clock when he left, say half an hour before he was shot.”

“You and Vogel get along pretty well?”

The gambler’s eyes switched up to mine, turned to the floor again.

“You know better than that. You heard him riding me ragged. Well, he kept that up⁠—maybe was a little rawer toward the last.”

“And you let him ride?”

“I did just that. I make my living out of cards, not out of picking fights.”

“There was no trouble over the table, then?”

“I didn’t say that. There was trouble. He made a break for his gun after I cleaned him.”

“And you?”

“I shaded him on the draw⁠—took his gun⁠—unloaded it⁠—gave it back to him⁠—told him to beat it. He went.”

“No shooting in here?”

“Not a shot.”

“And you didn’t see him again until after he had been killed?”

“That’s right.”

I got down from my perch on the table and walked over to Nisbet, holding out one hand.

“Let me look at your gun.”

He slid it swiftly out of his clothes⁠—butt-first⁠—into my hand. A .38 S. & W., loaded in all six chambers.

“Don’t lose it,” I said as I handed it back to him, “I may want it later.”

A roar from Peery turned me around. As I turned I let my hands go into my coat pockets to rest on the .32 toys.

Peery’s right hand was near his neck, within striking distance of the gun I knew he had under his vest. Spread out behind him, his men were as ready for action as he. Their hands hovered close to the bulges that showed where their weapons were packed.

“Maybe that’s a deputy sheriff’s idea of what had ought to be done,” Peery was bellowing, “but it ain’t mine! That skunk killed Slim. Slim went out of here toting too much money. That skunk shot him down without even giving him a chance to go for his iron, and took his dirty money back. If you think we’re going to stand for⁠—”

“Maybe somebody’s got some evidence I haven’t heard,” I cut in. “The way it stands, I haven’t got enough to convict Nisbet, and I don’t see any sense in arresting a man just because it looks as if he might have done a thing.”

“Evidence be damned! Facts are facts, and you know this⁠—”

“The first fact for you to study,” I interrupted him again, “is that I’m running this show⁠—running it my own way. Got anything against that?”

“Plenty!”

A worn .45 appeared in his fist. Guns blossomed in the hands of the men behind him.

I got between Peery’s gun and Nisbet, feeling ashamed of the little popping noise my .32s were going to make compared with the roar of the guns facing me.

“What I’d like”⁠—Milk River had stepped away from his fellows, and was leaning his elbows on the bar, facing them, a gun in each hand, a purring quality in his drawling voice⁠—“would be for whosoever wants to swap lead with our high-diving deputy to wait his turn. One at a time is my idea. I don’t like this idea of crowding him.”

Peery’s face went purple.

“What I don’t like,” he bellowed at the boy, “is a yellow puppy that’ll throw down the men he rides with!”

Milk River’s dark face flushed, but his voice was still a purring drawl.

“Mister jigger, what you don’t like and what you do like are so damned similar to me that I can’t tell ’em apart. And you don’t want to forget that I ain’t one of your rannies. I got a contract to gentle some horses for you at ten dollars per gentle. Outside of that, you and yours are strangers to me.”

The excitement was over. The action that had been brewing had been talked to death by now.

“Your contract expired just about a minute and a half ago,” Peery was telling Milk River. “You can show up at the Circle H.A.R. just once more⁠—that’s when you come for whatever stuff you left behind you. You’re through!”

He pushed his square-jawed face at me.

“And you needn’t think all the bets are in!”

He spun on his heel, and his hands trailed him out to their horses.

VII

Milk River and I were sitting in my room in the Canyon House an hour later, talking. I had sent word to the county seat that the coroner had a job down here, and had found a place to stow Vogel’s body until he came.

“Can you tell me who spread the grand news that I was a deputy sheriff?” I asked Milk River, who was making a cigarette while I lit one of the Fatimas he had refused. “It was supposed to be a secret.”

“Was it? Nobody would of thought it. Our Mr. Turney didn’t do nothing else for two days but run around telling folks what was going to happen when the new deputy come. He sure laid out a reputation for you! According to his way of telling it, you was the toughest, hardest, strongest, fastest, sharpest, biggest, wisest and meanest man west of the Mississippi River.”

“Who is this Turney?”

“You mean you don’t know him? From the way he talked, I took it you and him ate off the same plate.”

“Never even heard any rumors about him. Who is he?”

“He’s the gent that bosses the Orilla County Company outfit up the way.”

So my client’s local manager was the boy who had tipped my mitt!

“Got anything special to do the next few days?” I asked.

“Nothing downright special.”

“I’ve got a place on the payroll for a man who knows this country and can chaperon me around it.”

He poured a mouthful of grey smoke at the ceiling.

“I’d have to know what the play was before I’d set in,” he said slowly. “You ain’t a regular deputy, and you don’t belong in this country. It ain’t none of my business, but I wouldn’t want to tie in with a blind game.”

That was sensible enough.

“I’ll spread it out for you,” I offered. “I’m a private detective⁠—the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency. The stockholders of the Orilla Colony Company sent me down here. They’ve spent a lot of money irrigating and developing their land, and now they’re about ready to start selling it.

“According to them, the combination of heat and water makes it ideal farm land⁠—as good as the Imperial Valley. Nevertheless, there doesn’t seem to be any great rush of customers. What’s the matter, so the stockholders figure, is that you original inhabitants of this end of the state are such a hard lot that peaceful farmers don’t want to come among you.

“It’s no secret from anybody that both borders of this United States are sprinkled with sections that are as lawless now as they ever were in the old days. There’s too much money in running immigrants over the line, and it’s too easy, not to have attracted a lot of gentlemen who don’t care how they get their money. With only 450 immigration inspectors divided between the two borders, the government hasn’t been able to do much. The official guess is that some 135,000 foreigners were run into the country last year through back and side doors. Compared to this graft, rum-running⁠—even dope-running⁠—is kid stuff!

“Because this end of Orilla County isn’t railroaded or telephoned up, it has got to be one of the chief smuggling sections, and therefore, according to these men who hired me, full of assorted thugs. On another job a couple of months ago, I happened to run into a smuggling game, and knocked it over. The Orilla Colony people thought I could do the same thing for them down here. So hither I come to make this part of Arizona nice and ladylike.

“I stopped over at the county seat and got myself sworn in as deputy sheriff, in case the official standing came in handy. The sheriff said he didn’t have a deputy down here and hadn’t the money to hire one, so he was glad to sign me on. But we thought it was a secret⁠—until I got here.”

“I think you’re going to have one hell of a lot of fun,” Milk River grinned at me, “so I reckon I’ll take that job you was offering. But I ain’t going to be no deputy myself. I’ll play around with you, but I don’t want to tie myself up, so I’ll have to enforce no laws I don’t like. If you want to have me hanging around you sort of loose and individual-like, I’m with you.”

“It’s a bargain. Now what can you tell me that I ought to know?”

He blew more smoke at the ceiling.

“Well, you needn’t bother none about the Circle H.A.R. They’re plenty tough, but they ain’t running nothing over the line.”

“That’s all right as far as it goes,” I agreed, “but my job is to clean out troublemakers, and from what I’ve seen of them they come under that heading.”

“You’re going to have one hell of a lot of fun,” Milk River repeated. “Of course they’re troublesome! But how could Peery raise cows down here if he didn’t get hisself a crew that’s a match for the gunmen your Orilla Colony people don’t like? And you know how cowhands are. Set ’em down in a hard neighborhood and they’re hell-bent on proving to everybody that they’re just as tough as the next one⁠—and tougher.”

“I’ve nothing against them⁠—if they behave. Now about these border-running folks?”

“I reckon Bardell’s your big meat. Whether you’ll ever get anything on him is another thing⁠—something for you to work up a lather over. Next to him⁠—Big ’Nacio. You ain’t seen him yet? A big, black-whiskered Mex that’s got a rancho down the canyon⁠—four-five mile this side of the line. Anything that comes over the line comes through that rancho. But proving that’s another item for you to beat your head about.”

“He and Bardell work together?”

“Uh-huh⁠—I reckon he works for Bardell. Another thing you got to include in your tally is that these foreign gents who buy their way across the line don’t always⁠—nor even mostly⁠—wind up where they want to. It ain’t nothing unusual these days to find some bones out in the desert beside what was a grave until the coyotes opened it. And the buzzards are getting fat! If the immigrant’s got anything worth taking on him, or if a couple of government men happen to be nosing around, or if anything happens to make the smuggling gents nervous, they usually drop their customer and dig him in where he falls.”

The racket of the dinner-bell downstairs cut off our conference at this point.