Longarm and the Unwritten Law (2 page)

CHAPTER 2

The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News enjoyed a field day with what they described as the Sordid Love Triangle at the Viceroy Hotel. But after a couple of days on the front pages of both papers, things commenced to go about the way Longarm had expected.

Maxwell's slick Denver lawyers knew better than to enter a plea of justifiable homicide. Cockeyed Jack McCall had tried that in a Colorado court after backshooting James Butler Hickok up Dakota way, and everyone remembered the possibly unconstitutional but certainly fatal verdict. Colorado folks considered a homicide a homicide, and figured even a horse thief deserved to die by rope-dancing. So the old stockman's lawyers got the case postponed while their client had his head examined at a fancy private sanitarium down by Pike's Peak. That was the last of the case as far as any front pages went. Longarm had no idea where Maxwell's fat wife wound up. But a copper badge at the Parthenon Saloon did tell him Sunny Jim Stanhope had been buried out by the clay pits, neatly wrapped in mattress ticking, at no cost to the taxpayers and damned little to Maxwell's law firm.

By this time Longarm could see he should have asked more questions at that spaghetti joint the night he'd first wound up in bed with old Lina Marie. For while it was true she'd had no male friends out Denver way, she'd left out the part about wanting to find one in particular and settle down. It was a notion he'd run across before, womankind being less adventurous than himself. So he knew that once they got to saying they felt unfulfilled selling dry goods where they worked, or cramped for space in the furnished room that you'd found for them, it was only a matter of monthlies before you got that old ultimatum. But in this case the ploy was another gent, at work, who seemed anxious to make an honest woman of her, if only she'd forget that taller cuss with more hair who was only using and abusing her.

Longarm didn't invoke the Unwritten Law to go gunning for the son of a bitch. He just wistfully allowed there was no way he could top such a fine offer, and was sorry that he wasn't there to escort her to supper after each hard day's work, since that other gent, if he existed, seemed so set on making her feel so blamed fulfilled.

He didn't know why the pretty young widow woman he'd been planning to invite to supper instead slammed the door in his face when he showed up at her place on Capitol Hill with store-bought violets. He felt sure that whether Methuselah had really lived nine hundred years or not, he'd gone to his grave without understanding the unfair sex.

Fortunately, the head matron at the Arvada Orphan Asylum hadn't heard about him having spaghetti at Romano's with any blond hussy, and so Longarm got to work a tad later than usual the next morning with a crick in his back. He'd forgotten how athletic little Morgana could be after she hadn't been getting any for a time.

As he entered the marshal's office in the Denver Federal Building, young Henry, the clerk who played the typewriter out front, told him their boss, Marshal Billy Vail, had Attila the Hun in the back.

Longarm doubted that, but said nothing as he sat down on a bench and picked up a back-dated copy of Godey's Lady's Book, the marshal's wife saving her subscription periodicals for the office. Longarm had no call to sew a hem or bake a cake. But some of the pictures were interesting.

He looked up to exchange glances with Henry when they both heard loud cussing coming from Billy Vail's office. When mention was made of blowing someone's balls off, Longarm rose to his considerable height and ambled back to see who the visitor had in mind, his own.44-40 drawn but pointed down along the seam of his pants.

As he entered Billy Vail's oak-paneled inner office without knocking, he saw his stocky, bulldog-faced superior's visitor was a wiry gnome wearing a summer-weight seersucker suit with a brace of six-guns under his unbuttoned jacket. As they both turned to regard him, old Billy Vail called out from behind his cluttered desk, "Morning, Deputy Smiley! Has that slug-a-bed Deputy Long shown up yet? Mr. Homagy here has some serious charges he means to make to the rascal's face!"

Longarm knew how little he resembled the hatchet-faced quarter-Pawnee Deputy Smiley. So he figured his boss had to be as drunk as a lord or trying to slicker the scowling Homagy. So he just went on aiming at the rug in the uncertain light as he calmly replied, "Long was having breakfast in that chili parlor near the corner just a few minutes ago."

This was true. As soon as you studied on it. The wild-eyed cuss in the seersucker suit and six-guns didn't take much time to study on it. He said he knew the place and was already on his way, with a set jaw and a glare of grim determination as Longarm stepped aside to let him stride through the door as well as he was able.

Turning back to Vail with a bemused smile, Longarm asked what on earth might be going on. Vail was already up from behind his desk, and stumped over on his own short legs to snap, "Tell you along the way!" as he grabbed Longarm's left elbow to steer him out of the office and through the maze of connecting rooms and passages, adding, "That was Attila Homagy. Don't laugh. He's one of them Bohunk coal miners from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they must teach history different."

Longarm mildly replied, "Henry said Attila the Hun had come to call on us. I thought he was joshing. You said the jasper wanted to bring some sort of charges against this child, Boss?"

Vail soberly replied, "I just said that to keep the conversation polite. His exact words were that he means to blow your balls off, stomp your head flat, and then kill you."

Longarm whistled softly as they came to a last side door out to the softly lit marble corridor. Vail told Longarm to let him scout ahead. So Longarm stood there trying in vain to remember that funny-looking older man with the distinctive name until Vail said, "Coast seems clear. But it won't take him long to get up to that chili parlor and back. So let's move it on out. I want you to use those janitorial stairs at the far end to slip down and out the basement entrance. He might know about your hired rooms on the far side of Cherry Creek. So you'd best go on up to my house and tell my old woman to hide you out till I get there."

They were moving in step along the otherwise deserted corridor as Vail issued these grotesque instructions. But Longarm shook his head and said, "You're not making any sense, no offense. I had the drop on that bragging banty rooster just now, and you just saw that despite all his bragging he failed to recognize me on sight. So why am I supposed to act as if he was the one and original Attila at the head of all his Huns?"

Vail popped open what might have seemed a broom closet to the visiting eye, and hauled Longarm into the grimy cement stairwell before he explained, "You can't fight him. You'd lose no matter who won. Homagy claims that during the merry month of May, whilst he was attending a convention of the Knights of Labor, you were down in the Trinity coal camp playing slap and tickle with his young bride, name of Magda Homagy nee Kadar. She's from the same old country too. But none of that's as important as the spot it puts you in with a jealous husband out to avenge his honor as per the unwritten law!"

Longarm scowled in the gloom and growled, "There seems to be a lot of that going around this summer. I was nowhere near Trinidad in any part of this year's greenup. Don't you remember putting me on court duty right after I came in with that prisoner in the first week of May?"

Vail grumbled, "Of course I do. I told him that, just now. That was when he raised his voice to me. He said it was natural for a man's pals to lie for him. But that his Madga had confessed to him, in Bohunk, that she'd been led down the primrose path by a slicker with a badge who'd implied they'd all wind up back in that empire they never wanted to see again if she didn't surrender her reluctant ass to him. She says you made her suck it at the point of a gun when she allowed she'd as soon be deported. I suspicion that's the part he feels most upset about."

Longarm allowed himself to be moved down the stairs, but as they descended he still said, "You mean so he says. Billy it's established I was never anywhere near his informative Magda. Meanwhile, have you ever considered how many enemies I may have made packing this badge and my guns for you, or how convenient it might be to offer such a dramatic excuse to a grand jury, should one not make it out of town after gunning a lawman for fun and profit?"

Vail said, "Don't try to teach your granny how to suck eggs. I'll naturally send a heap of wires about two-gun Bohunks as soon as I can make sure you can't gun one another. But there's a hole in the plan you just presented. At the risk of turning your pretty head, you do enjoy a rep for winning gunfights. So one would think a man hired to gun you might not want to warn you in advance that he's out to gun you."

Longarm shook his head. "A hired gun, by definition, is a cuss who thinks he can take all comers, one way or another. His main concern, like I just said, is a good excuse to justify his actions to the folks he ain't been paid to kill. I found a runt in a seersucker suit called Attila amusing too. But who's to say who was bullshitting whom just now?"

Vail said he failed to follow Longarm's drift. So his tall deputy explained. "He might have just been pretending you'd fooled him with that sly introduction. You'd think a man would know who he was gunning for if he rode the D&RG northbound all the way from Trinidad to gun him. So let's say he roared in like a lion, expecting you to get him to leave like a lamb, after stating his intent to demand satisfaction."

"What for?" asked Vail with a puzzled scowl. "Seems to me a man would only make himself look more foolish if he ran all over threatening to kill someone and then... Oh, I do follow your drift!"

Longarm nodded grimly and said, "I'd be as easy to backshoot over in the Parthenon as Hickock was that time in the Number Ten. What got McCall in so much trouble then was that he just up and surprised hell out of everyone in Deadwood. Had he told all the boys in advance how old Wild Bill had been mean to him..."

They were at the bottom of the stairs now. Vail said, "I'll meet you later at my place up on Sherman. By then I'll have had time to wire some old pals in Trinidad and vice versa. Should our mysterious stranger turn out to be a stranger down yonder as well, I can have some of the other boys he can't possibly know pick him up, for some serious conversation. Should he really turn out to be Attila the Hungarian with a ruined marriage to avenge, we got an even more serious situation to converse about. In either case, I want you off the streets and out of sight whilst Henry and me get a better grip on things."

Longarm allowed he'd do as he was told for now. So they parted friendly and Longarm slipped out the basement entrance to the east as Vail climbed back up to his second-story office, muttering about gents who couldn't handle their fool wives.

It wasn't high noon yet, and Longarm knew he'd wind up beating rugs or splitting stove wood if he showed up at the Vail house too early on a workday. The motherly-looking but house-proud old biddy Billy Vail was married up with knew he worked for her man, and held that the devil found work for idle hands. She'd been like that ever since she'd found out about him and that young widow woman down the street from her.

It was too early to eat more chili, and he'd promised he'd get off the downtown streets of Denver. So he ambled on over to that rooming house he'd rustled up for old Lina Marie. He had his own key and the buxom blonde, for all her faults, would be at work until after five.

Meanwhile, he'd never gotten to read those magazines or smoke half the tobacco he'd carried up her stairs, along with the usual flowers, booze, and candy. So this unexpected afternoon off would offer the opportunity to kick off his boots and catch up on some casual smoking and reading, with nobody grabbing at his privates just as he was getting to the end of an article or the solution of a detective story. He liked those English detective stories a lot, even though those fancy English crooks seemed to use more imagination on paper than plain old American crooks did in real life.