David Gates - Blood Money

Fifty thousand dollars was a lot of money to turn down.

Colonel Benét found the bounty hunter overscrupulous.

“Simple justice,” the colonel said. “An eye for an eye.”

“You don’t appear to be looking for justice,” Placido Geist told him. “You’re soliciting murder for hire.”

“I didn’t realize your principles were so inelastic.”

“My principles are elastic enough, but my neck isn’t,” the bounty hunter said. “What you’re asking me to do would get me a brief drop on a short rope.”

“I want recompense.”

“You want retribution.”

“Call it what you will,” the colonel said stiffly.

“I call it nothing I want a part of.”

“Are you all that squeamish? Your reputation would suggest otherwise.”

“My reputation isn’t something I’m required to inhabit with the understanding that it invites insult,” Placido Geist said.

“I doubted you’d accept the commission,” Lockjaw Lamar told him.

“And then some,” the bounty hunter snorted.

The judge smiled. “You don’t sound very taken with Colonel Benét.”

“I understand he’s suffered a bitter loss, but the solution is out of line with his injury.”

“His only son dead and any hope for a grandchild lost?”

“You’re acting Devil’s Advocate.”

“A role that singles me out, often enough.”

The bounty hunter smiled as well. The two men had met during a charged political inquiry that resulted in damage to a good many reputations and elevated others less deserving.

“The argument, if I might label it so,” the judge said, “is that Colonel Benét requires a blood price be paid.”

“He’s not entitled to it.”

“The man got your back up, I see.”

“It’s one thing to contemplate revenge,” Placido Geist said to the judge. “I know I have.”

The judge had been a party to it too, and chose to let the bounty hunter’s remark pass.

“It’s another thing entirely to compass a homicide.”

“Conspiracy to commit a killing is felony murder. Unless you could contrive to make it appear otherwise, an assassination cloaked as, say, self-defense.”

“Well, that’s what he thought he was paying for. Which, on balance, is why I found him offensive,” the bounty hunter said.

“That he’d hire it done.”

“And seek to avoid penalty. It’s a coward’s choice.”

“You think he should gun the man himself and face whatever consequences afterwards?”

“It would be a damn sight more honest, and honorable.”

“Maybe honorable doesn’t enter into it,” the judge said.

“But he wants his name attached to the business, that’s the point. Not whispered about. Spoken of. An open secret.”

“Not probative. A rumor doesn’t invite indictment.”

“No, but it intimidates. Colonel Benét wants his fiat, his whim, made corporal.”

“To demonstrate his reach.”

“I’d suggest it was a demonstration of his own vanity.”

“To have this man — what’s his name, Emory? — put down like a dog that kills chickens, simply because he can.”

They agreed, then, on the moral point. It was the shoal water of particular incident they’d run aground in. And it was to be admitted that Colonel Benét had in fact suffered an irredeemable injury. It was also pretty much agreed that what had happened was simple bad luck: Nathan Benét, the colonel’s son and heir, the repository of his dynastic ambitions, had been the unhappy victim of another man’s carelessness, or stupidity, but the inquest ruled it accidental death, and no charge of manslaughter was filed. Set at liberty, the man Colonel Benét held responsible promptly departed the immediate environs, sensibly assuming Texas law could be bought, and was reported to be presently at large in the Bootheel of New Mexico.

The facts were these. A woman named Magdalena Benavidez maintained a house of ill repute in Del Valle, just south of the capital. It was much frequented by state legislators, and she enjoyed the protection of both the Austin city police and Travis County sheriff’s deputies. On the afternoon in question, the man later identified as Kick Emory was disporting himself in one of the upper front rooms. Kick was an itinerant, not exactly a bum, but someone who put his hand to what he found, whether it were carpentry or cowpunching, and it happened he found himself flush with money that week in Austin. He spent most of the week at Magdalena’s cathouse, favoring one girl over the others, a red-headed Anglo who called herself Philadelphia Sinclair and claimed to be from back East. In truth, her name was Jemmie Dart, she’d been a whore for all her grown life, and she’d never been east of Kansas.

Why, might we ask, did Nathan Benét also happen to be frequenting a whorehouse on the afternoon in dispute? It was a question his father seemed unlikely or unwilling to address. Nathan was recently married; his wife was in fact now pregnant with their first child; he had nothing to answer for and had everything to look forward to. Let’s say simply that a man of his background, with his responsibilities — and his father’s expectations — found it easier, or somehow simpler, to get his pipe smoked without consequences. It was certainly common enough, and Magdalena’s was exactly the place you’d go, discreet if openly talked of (in male company), flagrant behavior kept private, transactions to be negotiated, anything to be had for a price.

This, then, was the concatenation of circumstance.

Kick Emory caromed off the roof of the veranda in a shower of glass, thrown out the window of Jemmie Dart’s room by one of Magdalena’s bouncers. Violence offered the whore, perhaps, or merely underpayment, but later inquiries made it unclear. He then slid off the roof of the veranda and fell on Nathan Benét.

Kick was unhurt, if bruised and embarrassed. Nathan’s neck was broken. The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure; a man in his underclothes wasn’t an instrument of murder. The problem was compounded by both the personal and the political: The colonel’s boy couldn’t be dead of stupidity.

There was more than enough blame to go around, and further accident, or unhappiness. The colonel’s daughter-in-law lost her child, and the colonel was denied the fruit of his son’s seed. Magdalena Benavidez and her establishment were too well protected for the colonel to attack in person, but the whore Jemmie Dart disappeared, perhaps returning to the family she’d sometimes spoken of. More likely she was sold into the cribs of El Paso, and from there across the river. The bouncer was found dead in an irrigation ditch, drowned in two inches of water and alleged to be drunk at the time.

Such a series of mischance didn’t go unnoticed.

“He’s stalking them,” Placido Geist said.

“Anybody involved with his son’s death, culpable or no.”

“They’re all culpable, in his view.”

“I take your point,” Lamar said. He could see the bounty hunter was wrestling with himself, but the judge wasn’t someone who’d intrude on another man’s internal struggle. He understood well enough how your gut could tighten with anger or guilt.

“Damn the man,” Placido Geist said. He meant Benét.

Not that Kick Emory was any prize himself. He’d been in and out of scrapes for all his adult life, short though it was to date, and had done time in Kansas for manslaughter. There was, therefore, some logic in the colonel’s demand that Kick be held accountable, as the world at large might best be rid of him and his skills at courting trouble.