The Family Jensen Read online

  But he wasn’t going to forget his hunch about a trap. He wasn’t going to waltz in blindly.

  He folded the paper and stuck it in his shirt pocket. The notion that Longacre had people in town who were working secretly for him was an intriguing one. Matt wanted to find out if that was true.

  After putting the match back between door and jamb, he went downstairs, luckily not encountering Ferguson or Maureen on the way. He didn’t want to have to explain to them why he was going back out after he had told them he was turning in for the night.

  Some people were still out and about, but Halltown was settling down for the night. Matt walked to the Sierra House and entered the hotel with a nod for the sleepy clerk behind the desk. As he started up the stairs, he thought maybe he should have come in the back way. Then he discarded the idea. He didn’t have any reason to be skulking around.

  The second-floor corridor was deserted. His hand rested lightly on the butt of his .44 as he walked toward the big door at the end of the hall. When he got there, he used his left hand to knock.

  “Virginia?” he called quietly. “It’s Matt Jensen.”

  It was going to be awkward if Longacre had shown up again, he thought. Virginia might not have expected that.

  No one came to the door. Matt leaned closer and listened but didn’t hear a sound from inside the suite. He knocked harder, thinking that Virginia might be in one of the other rooms.

  Still no response.

  It couldn’t be an ambush if no one let him into the room, he told himself. Maybe he’d been wrong about it being a trap. He was about to knock again when he paused and sniffed the air, like he had outside the door of his own room in the Ferguson Hotel.

  He smelled something that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

  It was a coppery tang that he had smelled before. As soon as he realized what it was, he reached down with his left hand, grasped the doorknob, and twisted. The knob turned. He threw the door open and stepped into the room with the Colt in his right hand.

  The odor thickened and made his stomach clench in horror. His gaze dropped to the floor, and he saw Virginia Barry lying there on the thick rug without a stitch of clothing on, but there was nothing erotic about the sight. A dark red puddle was soaking into the rug around her head, and blood still welled slowly from the gaping wound in her throat, adding to the puddle.

  Matt took an instinctive step toward her even though he knew it was too late to help her. Her blue eyes were wide open, staring lifelessly at him, and they seemed to draw him on. At the same time, his brain screamed a warning and he started to twist around.

  Too late. What felt like the whole world fell on his head, crashing down with such stunning force he had no chance to resist. He started to crumple, but before he passed out and hit the floor a few feet away from Virginia Barry’s gruesome corpse, he knew he was wrong. It wasn’t the whole world that had come crashing down on him. More like a mountain.

  A man-mountain named Judd Talley.

  Chapter 14

  The pain seeping into Matt’s brain told him he was still alive, and that was better than the alternative. Not by much, though. It felt like a bunch of lunatic blacksmiths had set up a giant forge inside his skull and were pounding out enough horseshoes for the whole blasted U.S. Cavalry.

  Something hard prodded his shoulder, setting off a fresh clamor of agony in his head. A voice, distorted by the pain but still recognizable, ordered, “Wake up, Jensen.”

  Matt pried his eyes open and found himself staring down the twin barrels of a shotgun.

  “Don’t you try nothin’,” Sheriff Walt Sanger said. “Right now I’d like nothin’ better than to blow your head off, mister.” The lawman’s voice trembled a little with outrage. “Anybody who’d do somethin’ like that to a woman deserves whatever happens to him.”

  Despite the pain in Matt’s head, his brain was functioning well enough for him to realize what was going on. He tried to speak, but his lips and tongue were so dry that they wouldn’t work. Finally, he was able to husk, “Sheriff, I . . . I didn’t . . .”

  “Don’t waste your time lyin’, boy.” Sanger glanced at somebody Matt couldn’t see. “Get him on his feet.”

  A couple men stepped up, grasped Matt’s arms, and hauled him upright. The room spun crazily around him for a moment, as if the world had started turning the wrong way. When it settled down and he could see straight again, he saw that he was still in the sitting room of Cyrus Longacre’s suite in the Sierra House. Virginia Barry’s body still lay there a few feet away. The puddle of blood had soaked into the rug and darkened, until it was almost black.

  The men continued to hold on to Matt’s arms, gripping them painfully tight so he couldn’t get away. He recognized them as hombres he had seen around town. They glared at him with loathing and seemed to be making an effort not to look at the grisly sight on the floor.

  Matt licked his lips and said in a stronger voice, “Sheriff, I didn’t do this. Miss Barry was dead when I got here.”

  Sanger stepped closer and poked Matt hard in the belly with the shotgun. “Damn you, I said not to lie about it,” he grated. “I see it with my own eyes. That’s your knife on the floor beside her, ain’t it?”

  With his spirits sinking, Matt looked down and saw his Bowie laying just outside the puddle of blood. The broad, heavy blade was smeared with crimson. “Yes, but whoever knocked me out took my knife and wiped Miss Barry’s blood on it.”

  Sanger gave a contemptuous snort. “Yeah, that’s a likely story.”

  “It’s the truth,” Matt said as a feeling of desperation grew stronger inside him. “Think about it. You came in here and found me lying unconscious on the floor, right?”

  “Yeah, right next to that poor dead woman. You know good and well that’s what I found, Jensen.”

  “Well, then, what do you think happened? Do you really believe I cut her throat and then knocked myself out?”

  “No, I think she tried to fight back when you came at her with that knife,” Sanger said. “She grabbed that pitcher off the table and busted it over your head, probably with her dyin’ breath.”

  Matt’s gaze shifted. He saw the broken shards of a heavy ceramic pitcher lying scattered on the floor at Virginia’s feet.

  “That pitcher wasn’t broken when I came in,” he said. “Whoever knocked me out broke it to make it look like Virginia hit me with it. Can’t you see that, Sheriff?”

  Sanger shook his head. “All I see is a no-good, lyin’ polecat who killed a young woman. Maybe she wasn’t quite what you’d call a respectable woman, but that don’t matter.”

  For the first time, Matt agreed with something Sanger said. No matter what Virginia had been, she didn’t deserve the gruesome fate that had claimed her.

  He tried again to get through to the lawman. “Someone’s trying to make it look like I killed her, Sheriff, but I swear I didn’t.”

  He knew who was behind it. Judd Talley had knocked him out, and Talley was probably the one who had killed Virginia. And he’d done it on Cyrus Longacre’s orders. It was hard to believe Longacre could be so ruthless as to have his own mistress murdered just to frame Matt for the killing, but that was obviously what had happened.

  It was obvious to him, anyway, Matt thought, but he seemed to be the only one.

  Sanger said, “Take him over to the jail, fellas. I’m puttin’ this lobo behind bars where he belongs.”

  “Wait a minute, Sheriff,” Matt said, trying one final time to make the man see reason. “Why did you come up here?”

  Sanger frowned. “What do you mean, why’d I come up here?”

  “You didn’t just wander down the hall and find us.”

  “Well, of course not! The clerk downstairs come runnin’ into my office and said somebody was screamin’ up here. Said it sounded like a woman bein’ killed. That was right after you came up here.” Sanger grunted. “Turned out he was right.”

  Matt took a deep breath. “He was lying. Lik
e I told you, Virginia Barry was dead when I got here. She couldn’t have screamed.”

  “I got your word for that, nothin’ else,” Sanger said. “And I don’t believe a word that comes outta your mouth, mister.”

  “Why not?” Matt knew he ought to keep his anger under control, but he couldn’t. “Because you’re scared of Judd Talley? Or because Cyrus Longacre has paid you off? Or is it both of those things, Sheriff?”

  The shotgun shook a little in Sanger’s hands. The men holding on to Matt looked nervous. They knew at that range, if Sanger pulled the triggers the double load of buckshot would cut them down, too.

  After a moment, Sanger lowered the Greener. Holding it at his side in his left hand, he used his right to draw the revolver on his hip. He pointed the gun at Matt and said hoarsely, “Take him to jail. And if you want to make a break for it, Jensen, you go right ahead. I’d plumb enjoy puttin’ a bullet in your brain.”

  As a matter of fact, Matt had already thought about trying to get away. He knew he could break loose from the grip of the two men holding him, but didn’t want them to get hurt. They were innocent citizens trying to help the sheriff. They weren’t part of Longacre’s scheme.

  He also didn’t want to be considered a fugitive. If he escaped, it would be the same thing as admitting he was guilty. Then every lawman in the West would be against him. As much as it went against the grain for him, it might be best to put his faith in the legal system and prove his innocence. Obviously the hotel clerk was lying about what had happened. If there was some way to make him tell the truth . . .

  “I want a lawyer,” Matt said as the two men hustled him out of the room.

  “You’ll get one,” Sanger said as he followed closely with his gun barrel pressed against Matt’s back. The sheriff laughed. “You’ll get one, sure enough.”

  It was morning before Matt found out why Sanger had found that so amusing. They had marched him to the jail with Sanger’s gun in his back, shoved him into a cell, and slammed the door with an iron clang that rang of finality in Matt’s ears. As soon as he was locked in, Matt told himself he should have tried to escape, even though that meant becoming a fugitive from the law—or getting killed.

  Sanger refused to send word to Colin Ferguson about the arrest. Ferguson and Maureen were Matt’s only real friends in Halltown, and he knew they would try to help him. They would see to it that he had a lawyer.

  When morning came, the door between the cell block and the sheriff’s office opened and Sanger came in with a grin on his walrus-face. “Your lawyer’s here, Jensen. You said you wanted one.”

  Matt had been stretched out on the uncomfortable bunk. He sat up and got to his feet.

  Sanger beckoned through the open door to someone in the office. “In here, Roscoe.”

  Matt remembered the name. Ferguson and Maureen had both talked about Roscoe Goldsmith, the attorney who had tried to help the Paiutes stand up to Cyrus Longacre. The short, stocky figure who came shuffling into the cell block didn’t appear very heroic. In fact, despite the early hour, he was unsteady enough on his feet that he looked like he was on the verge of falling down.

  Sanger pointed into Matt’s cell. “There’s your client, right there. That’s the dirty murderer.”

  Goldsmith turned toward the cell and reached out with trembling hands to grasp the iron bars and support himself. He blinked bleary, redrimmed eyes at Matt. “Doesn’t . . . doesn’t look like a mad dog,” he managed to say.

  Sanger laughed again. “Reckon I ought to leave you two alone to talk. That’d be the legal way of doin’ things.”

  Matt started to make some bitter comment about Sanger caring only about Longacre’s way of doing things, not the legal way. But he figured he would be wasting his breath, so he kept quiet.

  Goldsmith made a visible effort to pull himself together. He gripped the bars and straightened up, planting his thick legs far enough apart to brace himself. He was in his fifties, Matt guessed, although drinking often made a man look older than he really was. His face was broad and flushed. His hair under a tipped back derby was brown and thinning. His tweed suit looked like it had been slept in every night for a week. The odor of rotgut whiskey came off him in waves, mixed with the reek of unwashed flesh.

  “My name”—the visitor began, then paused to belch before he resumed—“my name is Roscoe Goldsmith. I’m going to . . . be your attorney, young man.”

  “I didn’t hire you,” Matt snapped.

  “Maybe not, but if you want . . . want a lawyer, you’re sort of stuck with . . . with me. I’m the only one in Helltown except for . . . the prosecutor.” Goldsmith stopped, looked around wildly, and exclaimed, “The prosecutor! What . . . Wait a minute. I said that, didn’t I?”

  Matt kept a tight rein on his temper, but it wasn’t easy. “You’re drunk as a skunk.”

  “Having never seen . . . an inebriated polecat . . . I assure you, young man . . . I am drunker than a skunk!” Goldsmith waved an arm, swayed as that gesture threw him off-balance, and grabbed the bars again to steady himself. “But drunk or sober, I am also . . . the only honest lawyer in Helltown.”

  Something glittered in his eyes as he said that, a fleeting flash of anger, and Matt wondered how much of it was directed at Cyrus Longacre and his henchmen, and how much was turned inward, at the sort of man Goldsmith had become versus the sort of man he might have been.

  Matt shoved that thought away with a little shake of his head. He didn’t have time to feel sorry for Roscoe Goldsmith.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “I didn’t kill that girl.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Goldsmith said. “My job is to . . . to give you the best possible defense.”

  “It matters to me,” Matt snapped. “This is all Cyrus Longacre’s doing. He wants to get me out of the way, but he’s using the law to do it for him. His cronies back in Washington are probably pressuring him to make things appear to be legal, whether they really are or not.”

  Goldsmith belched again. “That’s what those people in Washington do, all right. Biggest bunch of thieves and guttersnipes—”

  “Get Colin Ferguson and bring him over here to see me,” Matt broke in. “Can you do that?”

  “Colin’s a good man. Good friend.”

  “Get him,” Matt said again. “We’ve got to start figuring out some sort of strategy for the trial.”

  “Better hurry, then. Trial . . . trial’s this afternoon.”

  Matt’s eyes widened in surprise. “This afternoon!” he repeated.

  “Judge Dunwoodie says . . . no need to wait. Every man entitled to . . . a speedy trial. Law says so.”

  Matt bit back a curse. “Get Ferguson now.”

  Goldsmith drew himself up. “See here, young man . . . I’m the attorney, not you. I . . . I . . .” His voice trailed off as a sick look came over his face. He suddenly twisted away from the cell door, stumbled a couple steps, and threw up in the corridor.

  “Sheriff!” Matt called, shaking his head in disgust. He stepped to the cell’s single window where the air was a little fresher.

  Sanger came in, saw what had happened, and muttered, “Son of a . . . I ain’t cleanin’ that up, Roscoe.”

  Goldsmith stood bent over with his hands braced on his knees, breathing heavily. After a moment he was able to straighten up. He turned toward the cell, wiped the back of a hand across his mouth, and said, “I’ll get Colin.” Then he stumbled out.

  “I ain’t cleanin’ that up,” the sheriff said again.

  “Roscoe’s really a smart man and a good lawyer, when he hasn’t had too much to drink,” Ferguson said as he and Matt conferred through the barred door a short time later. “It’s just that once every week or ten days, almost like clockwork, he goes on a bender. It’s been that way ever since his wife died. Poor fellow’s never gotten over it.”

  “I might feel more sorry for him if I wasn’t behind bars,” Matt said.

  “Tell me what happened,” Ferguson said. “Go through th
e whole thing.”

  When he finished telling Ferguson everything he knew about Virginia’s death, Matt said, “What I can’t figure out is why anybody would think I even had a reason to kill her.”

  “Oh, well, that’s easy enough. There’s lots of talk around town about it this morning. Everybody thinks you and the girl were, ah, romantically involved. People have seen you talking to her on several occasions. And there were witnesses to the fight you had with her last night.”

  “What fight?” Matt asked, then closed his eyes and tried not to groan. “When she slapped me on the boardwalk in front of the milliner’s shop.”

  “That would be the one.”

  Matt gazed through the bars at Ferguson again. “That didn’t make any sense to me at the time, but it does now. She had orders to make it look like we were fighting.”

  “Wait a minute.” Ferguson frowned. “She helped set up the motive for her own murder?”

  Matt shook his head. “I don’t know what she thought the plan was, but Longacre—or more likely, Talley carrying out Longacre’s orders—told her what to do. She probably didn’t have any idea the whole thing would wind up with her getting her throat cut.”

  “Well, it appears they’ve got the whole thing sewn up quite neatly. They’ve got a motive, far-fetched though it may be”—Ferguson paused—“it is far-fetched, isn’t it? You weren’t dallying with that girl?”

  Matt shook his head. “I give you my word, Colin, there was nothing between me and Virginia Barry.”

  “All right, then. I believe you. But they have motive, they have the clerk’s testimony that he heard the woman scream, and they have the sheriff finding you there with her body and her blood on your knife. Even an honest, unbiased jury might have a hard time returning a verdict of not guilty, lad.”

  “It’s unlikely there’ll be an honest, unbiased jury in Halltown these days,” Matt said with a bitter edge in his voice.

  “You speak more truth than you know,” Ferguson replied. His narrow face was grim. “Judd Talley and more than a dozen gunmen rode in this morning. The whole town’s scared. Talley acted surprised when he heard what happened to the Barry woman, and he and his friends are going around saying that if justice isn’t done, the town will pay the price.”