Longarm and town taming.., p.1
Longarm and Town-Taming Tess, page 1
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Tess laughed.
“I know exactly what you’re thinking, Mr. Know-it-all! You think I got elected to my office by sleeping with all the members of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association, don’t you?”
“Well, not all of ’em,” Longarm answered gallantly.
She asked in a worried childish tone if this meant he didn’t want to help her win the November election after all.
Longarm said, “I still feel honor-bound to investigate a possible election fraud or not, Miss Tell . . . I promised I would before I ever knew you, in the Biblical sense or any other. Like I was saying before, there’s business and there’s pleasure. I try to keep ’em separate in my skull. If this Big Dick Wilcox is up to anything dirty, I mean to put a stop to it. If he ain’t, I can’t, whether the two of us act dirty or not. So . . . do you want to get dirty?”
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THE GUNSMITH by J. R. Roberts
Clint Adams was a legend among lawmen, outlaws, and ladies. They called him . . . the Gunsmith.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LONGARM AND TOWN-TAMING TESS
A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY Jove edition / August 2003
Copyright © 2003 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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eISBN: 978-1-101-16671-0
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 1
Beavergame Banks said he’d cased the brick business-building across the way before dawn, slick as a polecat casing a henhouse before he circled in. But Swansdown Doris said she sensed a trap, adding, “They say Longarm is slicker than most marks, that he carries double-action cross-draw and moves like spit on a hot stovetop. And all that before one considers he’s the law!”
The small dapper con man skulking in the dark doorway of a vacant store across from the dawn-lit offices of Portia Parkhurst, Attorney at Law, told the usually more fashionably dressed bottle blonde of, say, thirty, give or take a few hard times, “I told you the day I read about that famous Blackfoot jockey busting his neck in the Omaha Steeplechase that for all his rep, the one and original Longarm is more crippled up inside than many a mark we’ve taken to the cleaners full of Cupid’s arrows, doll.”
Sweeping his cunning eyes up and down the still-deserted downtown business street, Beavergame Banks confided, “I ain’t carrying shit under this summer-weight frock coat, and I have it on good authority Longarm has a tough time hitting smaller men or drawing on an unarmed man. It’s true he has been known to flatten smaller men who’ve struck first, open-handed, firm, but fair. When women piss the big moose off, he just walks away from them, even when they’re throwing things. Don’t matter how big or tough a mark may look if he don’t have what it takes to beat up smaller men or women!”
Swansdown Doris demurred, “He’s the law! He don’t have to beat up smaller men or women. He gets to arrest ’em, and you agreed to meet for the payment in his lawyer’s office?”
Beavergame Banks said soothingly, “That’s why I asked you to come along as my own legal counsel and witness. Longarm ain’t about to arrest me or call my bluff. I told you he was crippled up inside. But even should he prove willing to drag the name of one of the only women he’s ever loved through the muck and mire of a scandalous trial, I’m too slick to give him grounds for any arrest that’ll stick. Like I told you back at our hotel when you dug in your pretty heels, it would be their word against our own. Blackmail’s almost impossible to prove when one side has the other outwitnessed, and no district attorney of a town the size of Denver wants to clutter up his docket with a jury trial for a can of worms!”
“Somebody’s coming!” Swansdown Doris hissed, crawfishing deeper into the storefront shadows.
“It’s about time,” growled Beavergame Banks. Then he cursed as he saw a couple of gents in business suits climb down from the hired hack to enter the offices across the way.
Swansdown Doris said, “All right then. Suppose he just tells you to go jump in the South Platte, or it turns out he don’t have the money. How much does a deputy U.S. marshal draw in a durned year to begin with?”
As the hack pulled away, another suited figure came down the sunny side of the street on foot. But he wasn’t Longarm either, damn it.
Resisting the yearning to light up, Beavergame Banks told Swansdown Doris, “To answer dumb questions in order, should the mark refuse in front of his lawyer to pay up, we just smile, say he’ll read all about it in the papers, and vamoose. We’re less than a furlong from the Union Station, with trains lighting out in all directions and any direction being out of town.”
He shrugged fatalistically and observed, “It happens that way sometimes. You got to know when to hold ’em. You got to know when to fold ’em, and you’re no worse off when a fish gets off the hook than you were when you dropped your baited hook in the water.”
He smiled, not in a nice way, and added, “They say he cried real tears when land-grabbers killed his Roping Sally from Switchback up in Montana Territory. They say he’s done right by the Blackfoot kids who weed the flowers he planted on her grave as well. Like I said, a lovesick simp!”
In a small, lost voice, Swansdown Doris murmured something about the grave site she’d likely occupy all too soon.
Beavergame Banks continued. “As to Longarm having the wherewithal to buy discretion from a wandering newspaper stringer such as I, they don’t pay higher-ranking lawmen enough to be worth our time. But our mark was fortunate enough to be sitting in with Poker Alice Ivers up in Leadville around the turn of the month, and it turned out to be his lucky night indeed!”
The pedestrian in the checked business suit turned in at the same entrance across the way as Swansdown Doris marveled, “Longarm won at cards with the notorious Poker Alice of the gold fields?”
Her parner in crime chortled, “It’s strongly suspected Poker Alice asked Longarm to sit in, and it seems to be true the Limey gambling gal deals with considerable sleight of hand. For Longarm came out a real winner after he politely but firmly suggested Lurching Luke Longacre could be endangering his own health if he insisted on horning in on Miss Poker Alice’s private game uninvited.”
Swansdown Doris wrinkled her drinker’s nose and said, “They say Lurching Luke never backs down and bad things happen if he fails to get his way. And we’re going over yonder to shake down hardcase killers such as Lurching Luke are afraid of?”
“We surely are, if that hansom slowing down across the way means to stop where . . . Hot damn, it has! And if that ain’t the one and original Longarm helping that woman in black down from their ride, he just sprung a twin brother! That gal he’s with must be the female lawyer he was bragging about. We’ll let them
As their hansom drove off and the rather handsome couple entered the building across the way, Swansdown, Doris said, “I’ve heard tell of Portia Parkhurst too, she being one of the few single women out our way who ain’t waiting tables or fucking for a living. They say she’s sharp as a tack. I reckon a woman would have to be to take male lawyers on in court and beat ’em more than half the time! No shit, Beav, I think we ought to pass on this sting!”
Then the small, wiry, and surprisingly strong Beavergame Banks was half-steering and half-hauling her along as he growled, “You were never invited to think doodlyshit, Swansdown Doris. I recruited you as bait for my beaver games, somebody to fuck when I wasn’t catching her in bed with marks, and on such rare occasions as this one to back my play as a witness to my purity!”
He hauled her up the stairs, and barely gave her time to smooth her features as he knocked imperiously on the office door lettered in gilt to read PORTIA PARKHURST, ATTORNEY AT LAW.
Longarm himself, standing over a foot taller than either of them, was the one who opened the door and welcomed them to enter in a sullen tone. Seated at her desk with a window behind her framing her fine-boned head and the silver-streaked black hair pinned atop it, the severely handsome Lawyer Parkhurst was trying to seem older than her late thirties, and not getting away with it.
Swansdown Doris wanted to kill her. It just wasn’t fair for another woman to be so trim in such a severe black poplin business suit.
Portia waved the two crooks to bentwood chairs Longarm had set up to face her desk. But even as they sat, she said, “You may as well know I have advised my client here to call your bluff. So for openers, just what have you got to sell?”
Beavergame Banks half-rose to hand her a few pages of carbon copy on onionskin paper as he confided in a reasonable tone, “Discretion. As a newspaper stringer or freelance reporter, I naturally took notes as the late Tim Medicine Dog lay dying in Omaha General after hitting a jump wrong and catching a whole lot of racehorse with his lower spine.”
Portia glanced up at Longarm and murmured, “Custis?”
Her client shrugged and allowed, “Name rings a bell. Can’t grow a face to go with it. Miss Sally’s spread was barely outside the Blackfoot Reserve. She sold some of her beef to the B.I.A. So she often had Indian kids hanging about.”
Beavergame Banks had risen from his seat to mosey over to a nearby doorway leading into another room of the office suite. Portia quietly said, “Mr. Banks, you said your name was?”
The con man threw the door open to step halfway into the other room. He turned back with a shrug, saying, “Just making certain it’s a private conversation, ma’am. I’d best have a look inside that corner wardrobe now, if it’s all the same with you-all.”
Portia and Longarm exchanged weary looks. Before she could suggest he be her guest, Beavergame Banks had flung open the doors of the wardrobe standing in a far corner. In high summer, there was little to be seen in the way of clothing hung inside. Portia dryly asked if he cared to search her filing cabinets for whatever was eating him.
Sitting back down, the wiry con man said, “Just making certain it’s your word against our own, Even Steven. As he lay dying, the Blackfoot, better known in racing circles, it appears, than back on the reservation, was asked by another reporter whether he had any wife or sweetheart back home to mourn for his life. That was when Tim Medicine Dog confessed on his deathbed to having loved and lost a forbidden white woman, the famous Roping Sally, to this even more famous Deputy U.S. Marshal Custis Long, or Longarm, as I’m sure most of our readers have heard tell of him.”
Settling back in his seat and grinning, Beavergame Banks really seemed to enjoy adding, “Medicine Dog said he’d been wrangling a spell by day, and sweating harder at night for Miss Roping Sally, when Longarm here rode in like he owned Montana Territory and everybody in it to get her redskin lover fired and take his place in the, ah, depths of her fair white body.”
Portia toyed with a pencil, but didn’t write anything down as she murmured, “Just Roping Sally? No last names to go with such a fair white body?”
Beavergame shrugged and said he hadn’t asked a dying Indian the last name of his forbidden love.
When Portia arched a brow at Longarm, he naturally could have told her the last name, but he chose to say, “They said she was an orphan gal, operating her old man’s spread after he went under. I disremember their family name, if I ever heard it. Like I told you earlier, I never took Roping Sally away from nobody up Montana way that time. She sold beef to the Blackfoot Agency. I was up yonder after killers who were working for a land-grabber out to cheat the Blackfoot. Seems I barely got to know poor Roping Sally before they killed her too. If any Indian, dead or alive, said he’d made love to Roping Sally before I showed up, he’s a liar, dead or alive!”
Portia asked, “Then why are we holding this meeting with these shakedown artists, Custis? As Mr. Banks here explained about witnesses, we have your word against that of a dead Indian, for heaven’s sake!”
Lounging on one arm of the leather chesterfield across from her desk, Longarm grumbled, “I don’t want nobody gossiping about poor old Roping Sally, with her not here to defend her rep. Like I told this here smut peddler, I’m willing to pay once to keep such smut out of the papers. But I wanted a lawyer to tell me how to make sure these . . . never-minds don’t come back the next time I’m in the chips to sell me the same fool smut!”
Portia shrugged and said, “You can’t. That’s why I advised you not to give them a plug nickel. But seeing you’re so insistent on parting with your poker winnings, I’ve drawn up this publisher’s contract for the both of you to sign.”
When both men stared thunderstruck at her, the prim lawyer gal explained, “In exchange for the thousand dollars Mr. Banks demands for his silence, he’ll be selling you all rights to publishing the last words he took down as Tim Medicine Dog lay dying.”
Longarm allowed he didn’t follow her drift. Beavergame Banks grinned and said, “Sounds sensible to me. But I have to read anything twice before I John it with my Hancock!”
Portia handed three sheets of legal bond paper across the desk to the sly-faced Banks, saying they were duplicates to be signed in triplicate.
Swansdown Doris said, “Don’t you do it! Can’t you see she’s trying to get you to sign a confession?”
“Confession to what?” snorted Beavergame Banks as he perused Portia’s single-spaced contract. The con man chortled, “I could use a lawyer like Miss Portia here to draw this agreement up for myself! It only says I’m selling them all rights to the statement I took down at the deathbed of Tim Medicine Dog in Omaha General a few weeks back. There’s only one paragraph outlining his last words, and it’s agreed I’ve never said I believed ’em to be anything more than an interesting news item. There isn’t anything here they could ever use against us. So let’s see some money and I’ll be proud to sign in quadruplicate, Counselor!”
Portia shrugged and told Longarm it was his money if he wanted to throw it away on a news item he never meant to see published.
Longarm handed over a hemp paper envelope stuffed with U.S. Treasury silver certificates. Beavergame Banks considered his options, shrugged, and signed.
As he and Swansdown Doris rose, Longarm said, “You are under arrest. The charge is attempted blackmail. We neglected to show you the papers signed by others. We have a night letter signed by Rain Crow of the Indian Police up Montana way to the effect that the late Tim Medicine Dog never worked for Roping Sally, and as likely never knew her before he left the reservation to work as a jockey before I was ever up there!”
The con man coolly replied, “Then you were right when you called him a liar. I never said anything about any sordid love triangle in Montana Territory. I only took down his dying words in Omaha General and—”
