Stringer Read online

  Stringer identified himself and explained what had happened. The deputy at the other end told him to stay put until someone could get up there and warned him not to move the body.

  Stringer said, “It’s already been moved. It was taking up valuable floor space and there’s no mystery at all, here. Buck Brown gunned the rascal as he was fixing to gun me. Tell your boss I think it was the man lurking about the library Helen Marsh was gunned in. The only I.D. he had on him was a Harrington-Richardson .32 he could have picked up anywhere for two dollars. But as we pile them up it stands to reason someone ought to be able to figure out who they might really be.”

  The deputy at the other end said he’d get someone out to El Dorado as soon as he could and hung up. Miss Gina said, “Make yourselves to home and I’ll fix us all some drinks. We’d best stay up here in case they call back.”

  Nobody from the sheriff’s department called, but Buck Brown had barely had time to sip his highball before the phone rang again. Miss Gina answered, grimaced at the fussing both men could hear from where they sat, and told Buck, “It’s for you. I hope it’s your mother. No real man would let a wife sound off so.”

  Buck took the phone gingerly, placed it to his ear, and blushed pretty good for a gent who’d just killed a man. He protested a few times, weakly, then promised and hung up, telling Stringer and Miss Gina, “It’s my mom. She says if I don’t come home this instant she means to come after me, with a broom.”

  “Swinging it or astride it?” asked Miss Gina with an amused smile.

  Buck said, “Mom ain’t funny when she’s riled. She means to give me a good licking for involving the family name in a parlor house shoot-out, no offense, and I’d best head her off lest she get here first and really mess up the premises.”

  Miss Gina laughed incredulously and said, “You just shot a man. The sheriff’s expecting you to stay here and sort it out with him.”

  But Buck insisted, “I ain’t half as scared of any sheriff as I am my ma, when she’s on the warpath. You can tell ‘em for me, can’t you, Stringer?”

  “Sure, Buck, you run along and head your mother off. In a pinch I can always say I gunned him. It’s not as if the rascal was all that popular in Calaveras County.”

  Buck Brown left. Miss Gina turned to Stringer and said, “Well, I must say that boy’s mother must be big and tough as hell!”

  Stringer chuckled and said, “Tough, yes. Big, no. As I recall Fionna MacSorley, she was a pretty little thing. I once had a kid crush on her, but she was too old for me.”

  “One of those redhead Irish girls, right?”

  “She was brown-headed and the Irish don’t have a monopoly on MacSorley. I think they started out as a sept of Clan MacDonnel. Anyway, it’s an old respected Lochaber name. They were sort of ferocious in the old country, too.”

  She looked bored and said, “I know, I know, you big blue-eyed Anglo-Saxons tamed the West and all that wahoo.”

  He said, “Don’t ever call my Uncle Don an Anglo-Saxon unless you want a lecture on Celtic history. Your own folk got a few licks of wahoo in, coming west. Did you know the last white man to see Custer alive was Trooper Martin, whose real name happened to be Martini? Most of the Indian-fighting army has always been immigrants recruited off the docks. Us native sons are harder to hire at thirteen dollars a month.”

  She sighed and said, “Right, the miners came in ‘49, the whores in ‘51, and then they got together and produced the native son.”

  He nodded soberly and said, “That might be true, in some cases. I forgot to ask you when you come west, Miss Gina.”

  She got up, saying, “Don’t be nasty. I told you I’m not that kind of girl and we did come west by wagon train when the Sioux were still acting up. Want another drink?”

  He nodded as he added in his head. Assuming she’d been big enough to remember, say at least three or four, that would make her at least thirty today. He wondered why this should concern him. What did it matter if he was old enough for her? It wasn’t as if she was Fionna MacSorley, for God’s sake.

  She brought their drinks back to the sofa and sat beside him, asking, “How long do you think it will take the law to get here?”

  He said, “Couple of hours if they’re in a hurry. Longer if they stick to the roads. Why?”

  She repressed a shudder and said, “I can’t help thinking about that corpse in my backyard.”

  “How come? Ain’t it fenced?”

  “Sort of. There’s a creek running along the back boundary of my property. Are you suggesting wild animals might get at him?”

  He shrugged and said, “I doubt coyotes would come this close to a lit-up, ah, wayside inn. You did say you had him wrapped in a tarp, didn’t you?”

  She nodded and he said, “There you go. Raccoons have been knowed to steal leftovers off a back porch. But they’re too proddy about our smell to eat us, even dead.”

  She started to cry. He stared at her, puzzled, and when he asked her what had gotten into her, aside from two drinks, she sobbed, “I’m scared, Stringer. Maybe I’m just being silly, but the idea of a dead man out back, maybe getting gnawed by bears and worse, just makes me feel all goose bumps.”

  He put his glass aside and got to his feet, saying, “There’s nothing worse than bears in Calaveras County. But I’ll tell you what we can do. We can just haul the cuss inside till they come to carry him away. You got a meat cooler downstairs?”

  She gagged and said, “I do, but surely you jest!”

  He said, “Well, I can see how some might not find that all too delicate. I know, we can shove him up in the hayloft, assuming you keep horses. Do you?”

  She said she did and rose to follow him as he headed back for the stairs. He told her there was no need for her to come along on such a grim chore, but when she pointed out he could get shot out back by her own crew, he let her come along.

  They went out back via the kitchen. Miss Gina recruited one of her kitchen hands to help and ordered him to bring along a bull’s-eye lantern.

  The three of them followed its beam outside through knee-high mustard and waist-high wild anise. It smelled so nice and the unseen brook murmured so pleasant he felt sort of mean disturbing a corpse enjoying such surroundings. But when they came to the tarp, spread in the weeds near the babbling brook, there was no corpse to be seen.

  Stringer frowned and took the lantern, as Miss Gina gasped, “Oh my God, he’s gone!”

  Stringer swept the beam about in futile arcs, muttering, “He may be missing, but he never got up to go anywhere. That cuss was dead as dead can get.”

  The kitchen helper suggested, “What if he was faking?”

  Stringer asked, “Face down in a spit-filled spittoon, with a .44 round in his back, high up? Besides, I felt for a pulse and there wasn’t any. So what we have here is one mighty ambitious raccoon or some human sneaks who carried him off. If they used the creek to cover their tracks, we have another mystery to worry about.”

  Miss Gina asked, “Why would anyone want to steal his corpse?”

  He said, “I just told you. To keep his identity mysterious. I know for a fact at least two similar-minded gents rode clear of San Andreas after gunning another possible clue to his identity. I sure wish we’d left him where he was in the first damn place!”

  Miss Gina asked what they should do now. He told her they had to phone this revolting new development in, so they went back up to her digs and did so. The deputy at the other end said the sheriff was on his way and would doubtless be mad as hell once he got there.

  Stringer hung up and told the brunette, “There went any chance of cutting them off if they’re making for the county line again. But maybe if I rounded up my own informal posse and we could cut sign before the trail gets cold—”

  Then she was all over him, clinging like a frightened child as she pleaded, “You can’t leave me alone and undefended, Stringer! I’m so frightened! What if they come back?”

  He started to tell her she was talki
ng dumb. But they had come back to gun Helen Marsh and he still felt sick about it. He said, “Well, the men you have working for you downstairs must sure be sissies. But they did tell me to stay put, I’m no owl, and…How come you’re unbuttoning my jeans like that, Miss Gina?”

  She sobbed, “I’ll do anything, anything, as long as you promise you won’t leave me till the law arrives!”

  He started to assure her he hardly needed that much in the way of convincing to guard her pretty hide. Then he wondered why anyone with a lick of sense would want to say a thing like that. So he hauled her in to make friends, getting to work on her buttons, as he asked her where on earth she kept her infernal bed in these parts.

  As it turned out, her bed was in an alcove behind the drapes. But long before he got her into it, she’d gotten him into her, on the Persian rug. He didn’t mind; she looked mighty nice spread naked on the rug with the lamplight illuminating her considerable charms, and if the floor was a mite hard on her overactive rump, she failed to mention it as he pounded her to glory.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  *

  “I feel so awkward,” Miss Gina said, as she and Stringer waved the sheriff and his posse off—fully clothed, of course. He didn’t know whether she felt awkward because of all the names he’d been called before the lawmen rode off, searching for sign in the dark, or because, as happens all too often, a notion that had seemed grand whilst wrestling on a sofa could feel sort of dumb once all concerned were dressed and acting proper again.

  He said, “Well, seeing I got my duds on, there’s nothing I can say to stop you if you aim to go on in and pretend it never took place, Gina.”

  She said, “I want you some more so bad I can taste it, you fool. I just can’t come up with a ladylike way to put it.”

  He said in that case there seemed to be no need for protracted negotiations and suggested they get back upstairs and out of both their dumb costumes.

  So a few minutes later she had him back upstairs and he was having her in a position he was surprised they hadn’t tried before. Now that order had been restored and the sheriff had left town again, a ragtime piano was sounding off downstairs. As Gina bounced atop him, stark, but with her hair still bound up, just in case, she reminded him of a schoolgirl enjoying a merry-go-round ride considerable, albeit she was built sort of mature for a schoolgirl. Her heroic, bounding breasts flushed pink as she climaxed and collapsed down against him. He rolled her over and finished right with her lush thighs around his waist and her nails playing hell with his love-lathered hide.

  As they shared a smoke, later, the buxom Miss Gina cuddled closer and murmured, “I guess you must think I’m a shameless slut, right?”

  He patted her bare shoulder with his free hand and told her, “Don’t go putting words in my mouth, doll. I confess it might be hard to mistake you for a convent gal, but there’s nothing wrong with being sort of, well frivolous, like that gal, Sal, in that song. She seems to be popular as hell these days.”

  She said, “My late husband and me really did open this place as a wayside inn. After he got killed in a fall three years ago I found it hard to make ends meet. So, to make up for the dearth of wayfaring strangers, I had to allow a wilder crowd than I really wanted to use my place as, well, a place to act wild in. But you have to believe me when I say I don’t do this sort of thing with just anybody, darling.”

  He blew a smoke ring at the ceiling beams and said, “Don’t tell me the grim details of your past, frivolous old pal. The less you tell me about yourself the closer you’ll stay to the you I made up.”

  She frowned and asked what he meant, adding she wasn’t too sure she liked the notion of being a figment of his imagination.

  He held her closer and said, “All of us are each other’s daydreams, Gina. We come into this old world inside our own fool heads and go out the same way, without ever getting inside any head but our own. We’d sure like to. That’s no doubt why we spend so much time kissing and shooting the breeze. But we never know for sure what anyone but us is really thinking. We each of us have someone in mind we’d just love to meet up with. So whenever we meet someone who halfway fits, we hope it’s him or her. It never is, of course, since it can’t be. But the bubbles last longer if we don’t say or do something that pops ‘em, see?”

  She said, “No. If we can’t talk about me let’s talk about you. I want to get inside your head, now that you’ve been inside me so much. Do you realize you had me on the rug with my clothes off before I knew whether you were married or not?”

  He chuckled and said, “That’s my point. Many a gal meeting a handsome stranger on a train has arrived at her destination sure she shared a Pullman berth with at least a prince traveling incognito because he wasn’t dumb enough to tell her he was on the road selling hardware while his wife and seven kids waited in a seedy boardinghouse, hoping he’d get back in time to pay the rent. But as my heart is pure, I can tell you I’m just an underpaid newspaperman, combining business with a visit home. I’d have left already if all this mysterious shooting hadn’t tied me up.”

  “Then you mean to stay until you solve some sort of mystery?”

  “I’m a feature writer, not a lawman. I’ve already got more’n two columns if I toss in the recent shootings as local color. So once the county says I’m not needed as a witness I aim to be on my way. The sheriff and his men get paid to chase owl hoots. I don’t.”

  “I hope you’ll remain curious enough to come back here as often as you can before you have to leave.”

  He said he was staying an easy ride away. It wouldn’t have been polite to point out her barkeep was ugly and all the other gals in town seemed to be downright whores or dangerous to mess with.

  He said, “While we’re on the subject of amusement under your old stage-stop roof, I don’t suppose you came across any old papers as you were making this place more amusing?”

  She rolled her head on his bare chest and told him, “We must have cleared out a wagonload of dusty old crud. Some of it may have been crumpled and crumbled paper. I recall some spiderwebs well because live black widows were still in ‘em. The place had stood empty for some time before we bought it off the county for back taxes. From some of the writing on the walls the townee kids had been using it for a haunted house and worse, depending on how old they were. Just what sort of old records would you be interested in, darling?”

  He said, “Duplicates of records someone saw fit to steal from the county clerk. I know for a fact a stage pulling out from here got robbed, down the road a piece, for I’ve been hearing the tale all my life. But every old-timer you talk to points out his own favorite bend in the road as the place Murrieta held up his last stage. If we knew more about what happened we could make a more educated guess as to where those treasure hunters might be most interested. I’d like to see the law wind things up before I have to get back to Frisco. But unless the search can be narrowed down, the hunt can go on forever, or at least until they get tired of searching for buried treasure and ride on to pester other folk.”

  She asked, “Don’t you think there could be anything to the tale of buried treasure? Could so many people have died for nothing?”

  He shrugged and said, “More than one greenhorn has been known to shoot it out with a pard over fool’s gold. That’s likely why they call it fool’s gold. Whoever’s behind all this hell-raising has to be taking it serious enough. I don’t suppose you hear much gossip about such matters in your barroom downstairs, eh?”

  She chuckled and said, “All the time. You’re so right about the way lonely people like to talk. Most of the local miners moved in long after Murrieta’s time, of course. But to hear some of the old-timers talk, they all knew Murrieta personally. I can’t say I’ve paid much attention. Men that old seldom appeal to me and, speaking of men who appeal to me, I’d best trim the lamp and open the window blinds so we can get some sleep.”

  As she rolled off him to cross the rug bare-ass Stringer said, “Hold on.
I can’t stay the night, no offense. Aside from my pony tethered out front I got a Crazyauntida who worries about me.”

  She threw open the blinds, the lamp still lit, as she told him he could stall his mount in her stable downstairs. He said, “I’m more worried about Crazyauntida. Don’t you mind the whole town staring at your naked charms, Gina?”

  She said, “There’s nothing but a horse pasture across the way and I’ve never had a horse get fresh with me yet. If I can’t get you to stay the night I want you to say good night to me, right, with some light on the subject.”

  He snubbed out his fag and said he’d try. Sights she might have seen in a horse pasture from her window may have inspired the position she chose. It wasn’t too romantic a way to say good night, so they finished right and she let him haul his duds on and go home.

  As he’d expected, lights were burning in the kitchen when he rode in. But he hadn’t expected all those horses tethered to the back porch rail. He put his own mount away and approached the house with a puzzled frown until he got close enough to recognize the sheriff’s palomino. Then he put his gun away and went on in to see what all the fuss was about, aside from his Crazyauntida, who was either having hysterics or enjoying her chance to coffee and cake a whole posse, it was hard to tell.

  The sheriff took Stringer aside to get clear of the noise and said, “We cut some sign and then lost ‘em, not too far from here. They might have throwed the body in Manzanita Creek.”

  Stringer asked, “How come? That’d be a dumb place to hide anything. I know the water’s muddy, but it’s shallow as hell in many a stretch. A body would be certain to hang up on a sandbar on its way to the Stanislaus.”

  “Not if it was weighted, in any number of deeps left by the old placer miners in the olden days. Come morning we mean to do some dragging. We need all the help we can get.”

  Stringer nodded and said, “I’ll be there. By the way, I hope you didn’t tell my aunt where you saw me last, this evening.”

  The sheriff grinned like a mean little kid and assured him, “I’m a peace officer, not a tattletale. That was some piece you was with, by the way. Do I have to tell you that dago gal is big trouble looking for a place to happen?”