Ed Gorman - Showdown

As he walked to work in the morning, still tired from the past couple of days, Prine worked on the way he would approach Daly this morning. Bob Carlyle generally went to the café first, and that was around ten. He took fifteen, twenty minutes. This would be all the time Prine would have alone with Daly—if Daly wasn't called away or some unexpected trouble didn't take both of them from the office.

He'd say, I made a bad mistake, Sheriff. And I need to talk to you about it . He half-smiled about this. It would be like going to confession. That's exactly what he'd be doing this morning. He'd say the rest the same way—straight out. He wouldn't make any excuses. There were no excuses to be made. Then it would be up to Daly.

Just before Prine reached the sheriff's office, his stomach curdled and the rolling jitters passed up and down his arms. This sure as hell wasn't going to be easy.

"There he is now," Daly's voice said before Prine had even crossed the threshold.

A city man in a homburg and a dark blue suit stood, holding a briefcase. He was a formal, stiff-looking man of forty years or so. If he'd ever laughed, you couldn't prove it by his narrow, severe face or hard blue judgmental eyes.

Bob Carlyle was grabbing his hat. Daly walked over and yanked his off the peg, too. "Prine, this is Mr. Silas Beaumont. Remember Al Woodward, who was here investigating the Pentacle fire? Well, he still hasn't turned up. So Mr. Beaumont here, who's a vice president of the insurance company Woodward hired out to, is here to find Woodward and carry on with the arson investigation. I told him that you'd talked to Aaron Duncan and that you'd be glad to help him. Meanwhile, Carlyle here and I thought we'd grab us a cup of coffee."

It was almost comical, the way Daly and Carlyle were rushing out the door. The Mr. Silas Beaumonts of the world were difficult to deal with. They just assumed, you being small-town, you were stupid and probably corrupt.

"See you soon, Mr. Beaumont," Daly said as he half-dove through the door, slamming it hard shut behind him.

"Coffee, Mr. Beaumont?"

"I'm not here for a chat, Mr. Prine. At this moment, I should be in Lincoln, Nebraska, where the stockholders of our company are holding their annual meeting. Instead, I'm in your little burg trying to find out what happened to one of our freelance investigators. There's a train out of here this evening, and I hope to be on it. So no—no coffee, no chat, nothing extraneous. If I can get on that train this evening, then I can be in Lincoln in a day and a half. Still time to pay my respects to our stockholders."

No coffee? How about a cob to shove up your ass? Prine thought. He'd gone from a reasonably good mood—hoping Daly would understand and forgive him—to a dour one thanks to this pale, mannequin-like intruder who was as imperious as a well-connected politician.

Prine said, "Well, I'll have a cup for myself, if you don't mind."

As he was pouring his coffee, he said, "When's the last time you heard from Woodward?"

"Last week."

"He pretty reliable, is he?"

"We check our freelancers out thoroughly."

Prine, steaming coffee in hand, angled his bottom onto the edge of his desk. He kicked a chair with rollers on it over to Beaumont. Beaumont's bloodless lips pinched up in displeasure. He wasn't going to give this office a very good grade. Not that Prine gave a damn.

But Beaumont sat down, briefcase on lap.

"Do you know anything about Aaron Duncan, Mr. Prine?"

Prine shrugged. "That he used to be a successful businessman is about all I know."

"Used to be?"

"The last recession hit everybody out here pretty hard. Farm prices went to hell, and the railroad didn't make us a spur the way they'd originally promised. Most people were in a bad way."

"From what I'm able to gather, Aaron Duncan owns four businesses within a one-hundred-mile radius."

Prine sipped some coffee. "That, I didn't know. Then maybe the recession didn't hit him as hard as it did some others."

"Or maybe it did. This is the third business—the Pentacle Mattress Factory—to be destroyed by fire."

"I see," Prine said. And he did. "Did you pay off on the other two?"

"Yes."

"Nothing suspicious about them?"

"A lot suspicious about them. But nothing we could prove."

"But this time—"

"Three out of four businesses owned by one man go up in smoke? The probability is virtually zero."

"He sounds desperate."

"Desperate and sloppy. The last time we heard from Al Woodward was in a wire he sent. He said he was sure he could prove arson at Pentacle."

Prine remembered talking to Aaron Duncan a few days ago. How Duncan's wife had left the office angrily, following an argument of some kind. He also remembered the bartender saying that Woodward had been looking at a letter somebody sent him. Would Aaron Duncan's wife—if she was angry enough—cooperate with Woodward by sending him a note?

"Do you have any ideas, Deputy?"

"One. Maybe." He told Beaumont what he'd seen in Duncan's office, the wife so furious when she left.

"It could have been about anything—their argument, I mean."

"I agree. But I still think it'd be worth talking to Mrs. Duncan."

Beaumont didn't look happy. "Anything else?"

Beaumont's disappointment irritated Prine. Made him defensive. Maybe Mrs. Duncan wasn't such a great idea. But she was a better idea than Beaumont had.

Beaumont said, "You checked all the—"

"—hotels, saloons, boardinghouses. No trace of Woodward."

Beaumont stood up. "I have a meeting in twenty minutes with Aaron Duncan. Maybe I'll have a little more luck with him than you do. I'm a pretty good interrogator, if I do say so myself. In the big cities, knowing how to question a man and lead him into a verbal trap is a valued skill. We used to do what you do out here—just beat a man till he talks—but we've found a skilled interrogation to be much more useful."

"I don't beat the men I question," Prine said. "I usually set them on fire."

"My Lord," said Beaumont, "is that true?"

Prine smiled. "No. But you wouldn't have been surprised, would you, Mr. Beaumont? The way lawmen treat prisoners 'out here.'"

Beaumont looked both unhappy and uncomfortable as he made his way to the front door. As if Prine had suddenly revealed himself to be a mental defective of some kind. What sort of person made jokes about setting other people on fire?

Most disturbing, most disturbing, Beaumont was obviously thinking, as he put his hand on the doorknob and made a hasty departure.

Chapter Twenty-three

There was a young woman Prine had briefly dated when he'd come to Claybank. She worked in the county records office. Prine had been more interested in her than she'd been in him. After a few evenings of stilted courting, she admitted that she was sorry but that she was just using his good looks as a way of making another young man jealous enough to ask her to marry him.

Which had apparently worked, because slender Sharon Sullivan was now portly and with child as she waddled up to him behind the counter of the records office. "Hi, Tom." She smiled. "I weigh a little more than the last time you saw me."

"Well, congratulations."

"Thanks." Even with a fleshy face, her smile radiated the pride of a good and decent woman. "And Art wants another one right after this."

"I'm glad it all worked out for you, Sharon."

Her sweet face tightened. "I'm just sorry I wasn't nicer to you."

"It was fine," he said. "And it turned out fine, too."

They talked a few more minutes about people they knew in common. This was the age—she was twenty-four to Prine's twenty-nine—that most still-unmarried folks, men and women alike, started looking around for a lifelong mate. There was plenty of gossip about all those various couplings and uncouplings.