The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

David Edgerley Gates Compass Rose

From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine

“And a man shall be as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land, as rivers of water in a dry place,” the preacher read from his text. He glanced across at the two mourners and shrugged his coat closer. The day was overcast, and there was a sharp wind. The other two men were better dressed for the weather. The preacher closed his prayer book and stepped back from the grave. “May the Lord bless you, and keep you, and make His face to shine upon you, both in this life and the life to come, now and forevermore.” He heard them murmur an amen.

There was no sexton for the little churchyard, and the preacher himself rode circuit, serving a number of small communities, none of them able to afford him a settled living. The two mourners had dug the grave that morning, although they were older men, not accustomed to stoop labor, and one of them had a game leg. The brief service over, they filled in the hole, stones and sandy soil rattling on the lid of the makeshift coffin. It had been carpentered from undressed planks, for want of better, and the corners buckled under the weight of the earth. Then it was covered from view.

“Did he have family, do you know?” the preacher asked.

“Back in Ohio or some such place as I recollect, but I misdoubt they were close,” the stout, shorter man said. He was leaning on the shovel, holding it much like a staff, but his efforts didn’t seem to have tired him particularly. “I’d imagine we made better provision.”

The preacher looked at the wind-scoured landscape around them and nodded. This corner of West Texas was a refuge to the kind of men who’d left family feeling behind them, for the most part, to stay one jump ahead of the law. The railroads and the automobile had worked mighty changes, but it was still a desolate spot, no more inviting than a penitent’s iron bed. The preacher sometimes questioned his calling.

The second man pressed a heavy coin into his hand. It was a twenty-dollar gold piece, the preacher realized with a start. Better than a week’s wages to some. He felt slightly embarrassed by the transaction.

The shorter man read his doubts. “You can’t set a price on the Lord’s work,” he said, not unkindly.

The preacher thanked them both and took his leave. He was grateful, and puzzled. The two sturdy old men struck him as out of place. Not strangers to the country, exactly, but long absent from it, like a pair of returning prodigals. A part of him wondered if it were simple Christian charity that had brought them such a distance to bury a pauper.

She’d grown accustomed to the treachery of men. Treated with indifference, or casual cruelty, she’d learned over time not to trust their confidences or the occasional kindness. She traded on her looks until her looks were gone and her stock fell. She’d worked the cowtowns and the railheads, saloons and fancy hotels, but she wasn’t canny or skillful enough to rise above her station, and her luck deserted her along with her youth. Now she was a two-dollar whore, past fifty, with no prospects but a lonely end from consumption or venereal disease, another tarnished jade cast aside by Fate. She had none to call friend and took little comfort in religion.

Her given name was Sarah Bledsoe, but she was known as Fat Sally. She had a crib behind the stables for which the farrier collected a garnish on her earnings. Most of her custom came from soldiers at the army post four miles distant, but the troopers were paid but once a month and spent their money first on whisky. Nor was she the first in men’s hearts. There were other women to service their needs, prettier, younger, clever and coquettish. Fat Sally was left with drunken doughboys too out of pocket to afford the better class of whore. She took the rougher trade and sometimes suffered for it. There was often vomit on her bed linen, and her body was seldom without bruises, or worse.

Somewhere she had a daughter, at least twenty by now but given up for adoption years before. Perhaps the girl had followed her into a life of degradation or been bound over to indenture or discovered escape in marriage only to find her husband brutish and weak. There was no way of knowing, but it was odds on that the girl’s life was an improvement on her own.

Sally Bledsoe figured she’d played out her string. This sorry place would see the death of her.

The war in Europe was now a year old, but the United States had yet to be drawn in. Wilson’s reelection platform in 1916 was neutrality, avoiding an open breach with any of the belligerents, though anti-German sentiment ran high.

The president may have chosen not to take sides in the European war, but the revolt in Mexico was closer to home. All along the border country there were skirmishes between federalistas and undermanned army garrisons, and Texas Rangers had taken the field against guerrillas raiding on American soil, some of them no better than bandits. In the Big Bend patience was wearing thin. Vigilante reprisals were common. Ugly incidents had reached the papers back East.

Placido Geist knew the country was a tinderbox. He’d traveled to Olvidados with an apprehension of the risks, but he felt an obligation. After they buried the Dutchman in the windswept graveyard, he showed Spengler the letter. It had been franked a month and a half earlier and had taken more than half that time to reach him. By then the man who signed the letter was already dead.

“I didn’t know the Dutchman could write so much as his own name,” Spengler said, putting on his spectacles as he unfolded the crumpled sheet of foolscap.

Placido Geist didn’t comment. His face had a secret, Indio cast. A lifetime of hunting dangerous men on both sides of the border had left its mark, or more particularly an absence, as if his flexibility of expression had been put aside in favor of a less demanding protocol, a formal gravity that reflected his severe and deliberate temper.

Spengler sat back on the deal bench, straightening his leg. He’d been buckshot in the right knee years ago, an old wound that troubled him more with age. He was a former El Paso city marshal, prudent and shrewd but not entirely without delicacy. Placido Geist considered him a friend.

The cantina was a crude affair, low adobe walls and raw logs for rafters. Spengler drew the candle closer across the scarred table and examined the letter, taking his time. It wasn’t the fist of an educated man, the coarse block printing a chore to parse. There was no salutation.

Spengler put the letter down and took off his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Well, son of a bitch,” he sighed.

“Not game I much care to flush,” Placido Geist said.

“That girl could be anywhere, blown to the four quarters of the wind,” Spengler said.

“A foundling, passed from hand to hand.”

Their excuses were halfhearted, the ritual grumbling of men who knew better than to shirk an incumbency. Otto Maas, a.k.a. the Dutchman, had gone to prison for manslaughter half a lifetime previous, and Spengler and Placido Geist had put him there. There was never any doubt he’d killed the man, a low sort who’d needed killing, but there were extenuating circumstances, as there so often are. Placido Geist had always been of the opinion that an injustice was done and that he owed the Dutchman a reckoning. Now the debt had come due, the Devil to pay and no pitch hot.

“You never had children, I take it?” Spengler asked him.

Placido Geist was abashed by the question, his future wife having died at an early age and the baby she was carrying dead with her, but Spengler had no way of knowing that and certainly intended no malice. “He must have labored some over that letter,” Placido Geist said, changing the subject.

Spengler nodded. “If he knew he was dying,” he said.

“How not? He wouldn’t have written it otherwise.”

“Did he try to find her himself, do you know?”

Placido Geist shrugged. “He would have lacked the temperament, the skills, and the wherewithal,” he said. “But he knew enough to leave it with us, more’s the pity.”

She’d been named Rose at birth, a pretty choice for a pretty infant, plump and baby-fragrant, with no foreknowledge of her thorny future.

A whore’s child, she was treated as such, taunted early and often with the stigma of having been born on the wrong side of the blanket. Later she would be struck by the hypocrisy, but at the time she was wounded, nursing her isolation and her grievance. The orphanage in Veronica was run, efficiently and without religiosity, by a grass widow from the North Platte whose common-law husband had been a hardware drummer lured by the promise of quick riches in the Klondike goldfields nearly twenty years before, of whom nothing had been heard since. Mrs. Abercrombie no longer anticipated riches or rescue, and she taught her young charges likewise, not to rely on false promises but to depend on their own diligence alone. It was a well-established recipe, plain and reliable as short crust, spoiled only in being overhandled.

Rose grew to detest the Abercrombie recipe, no pie in the sky, and found it no proof against disappointments. She was a moody girl, cheerful and sullen by turns, but she did her assigned chores on schedule and learned her letters, and when at the age of nine she was farmed out to a childless Hutterite couple who owned a tannery in Muleshoe, near the New Mexico line, she knew better than to complain. The work was smelly and arduous, the acids discolored her skin and blistered her hands, her foster parents were free with the strap but otherwise ungenerous, and she was altogether miserable.

Even a short time can seem very long to an unhappy child. Rose felt herself bound on the wheel. She ran away from the Hutterite couple after two months but was returned, fortuitously, to the care of Mrs. Abercrombie. Rose didn’t consider it a stroke of luck, but then she was ignorant of other, worse possibilities. Placed in a series of foster homes over the next few years, Rose fit in with none of them. She wanted desperately to please, of course, to be taken in by someone kind, but the cards were stacked against her, and perhaps her need was too obvious, her desires too raw. She was labeled an incorrigible, thankless and spiteful. Her ungovernable nature simply testified to her tainted origins.

“The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree,” the records clerk said with a wink of complicity.

Placido Geist was not a man to find wickedness in a child or look for blame in an accident of birth. He himself would have fathered a bastard had Amarita lived to bear his baby. He made no reply.

The clerk scanned the dog-eared ledger, running his finger down the columns. The crabbed penmanship was awkward, with common words misspelled, but someone had at least taken pains to note the particulars of people’s lives, their coming into this world and their taking leave of it. The ink had faded to a rusty tracing, so faint in places as to be almost illegible.

The clerk shook his head. There was nothing in the old book for the dates Placido Geist had given him. “Things weren’t as efficient back then, you understand,” he said to the aging bounty hunter somewhat condescendingly. “Nowadays we order our vital statistics with better utility.”

Placido Geist was inclined to agree, after a fashion. He’d noticed one of the new noiseless typewriters on the desk behind the counter. But there was still something human and plaintive about the faded entries written years before with a steel-nibbed pen in that uncertain but earnest hand.

He thanked the clerk and left. Spengler was waiting for him across the square from the courthouse. The stairs would have given him trouble, and he’d found a spot on a bench in the shade of an elm, taken his place with the other old men who showed up regularly to share tobacco and swap lies. It was just above noon, the day making up cloudless and hot. The empty Texas sky was as blue as glazed china, so bright it hurt the eyes.

Placido Geist crossed the square into the shade of the tree. Spengler broke off the conversation he was having with one of the men on the bench and got heavily to his feet.

“This is beginning to look like a fool’s errand,” Placido Geist told him.

They had little enough to go on, in truth, and it was a cold scent. They’d started in Lubbock and then taken the train north to Amarillo. In both places there was no record of a child born to Sarah Bledsoe, nor did they cut sign of a woman of Sarah’s description after all this time. They turned south again, the two of them canvassing the country in between, asking at courthouses and county seats, looking up baptismal records, talking to retired lawmen, interviewing doctors and midwives, although they took for granted that many a woods colt had slipped through the cracks and the likelihood of attaching a name or a history to an unbranded stray was scant.

Spengler, however, looked pleased with himself. “I’ve got a line on Sarah,” he said. “She was here in town not more than eight years ago, according to the courthouse gossips. They used to call her Fat Sally, but she owned to the name Bledsoe when she appeared before the local magistrate and admitted to maintaining a disorderly house. Not your better class of place, I don’t suppose, but she was never the highest class of whore, either.”

Placido Geist nodded thoughtfully. It was the first daylight they’d seen. “What was the disposition?” he asked.

“They assessed a stiff enough fine to get a lien against the property and put her out of business.”

“I take it she moved on,” Placido Geist said.

Spengler shrugged. “She didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, and none to go surety for her,” he said. “The sanctimonious bastards might just as well have turned her out naked.”

“What’s the nearest town of any size, somewhere she’d be able to pitch her tent for a quick return?”

“Buffalo Lake’s a water station on the railway spur to Clovis,” Spengler said. “She’d likely pick up some trade there, drovers and day labor, section hands. Not a rich vein to mine, but enough for a grubstake and her train passage.”

“If that’s the best we’ve got, we’d best get to it.”

“I’m thinking that’s exactly what Fat Sally Bledsoe told herself at the time,” Spengler commented dryly.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Placido Geist said.

He was a cut above her usual line of custom, she could see that from his dress and manner, and a stranger to town, but a curiously faceless man without what a Wanted poster or a bench warrant would have described as distinguishing characteristics. Sally was a shrewd enough judge of men to sniff out the faint odor of menace about him, a shadow behind his quite ordinary features, something that hinted at the pursuit of a secret vice. In this, however, she was all too ready to accommodate him, since it raised her price to humor a favored peculiarity. Avarice stilled her caution. She took him behind the stables to her room.

He seemed almost apologetic when he killed her, as if it were a necessary but distasteful exercise and he took no pleasure in it. He did it with dispatch, breaking her neck cleanly so as to cause her the least suffering, and Sally had not even time to wonder at the injustice of it. He’d given her no alarm, which he counted a blessing or she would have stiffened at his touch and struggled, making the business more difficult, but there had been no unseemly thrashing or disturbance. He took pride in the details, after all, an oddly clinical vanity that provided for his own safety as well. No one had seen them go off together, and when he left her in the soiled bedclothes, no one saw him walk away. If they had, he didn’t have a face people remembered. It was an asset in his line of endeavor.

They had some rough country to cover, but Spengler found sitting a horse uncomfortable so they’d hired a trap. It was no luxury, all the same. The day’s travel over poorly graded roads obviously did his bad knee no good, although Spengler made small complaint. It wasn’t his way. He shared a litany of stubborn virtues with the old bounty hunter, neither of them given to bellyache or boast. Like other men of their generation, they were used to solitude and the silence of their own company, and doing for themselves. Spengler still rolled his own smokes, not having accustomed himself to buy tailor-mades. Granted, there was much to be said for the conveniences of the modern world, but not for the erosion of homely skills that attached to that convenience. To a man like Spengler or Placido Geist, born well before the turn of the century, the novelties of the new age seemed confining, less a melioration than a shrinking horizon line, or perhaps the years had made them rigid and unforgiving. The qualities that had shaped them were no longer in demand, were in fact something of an embarrassment. They were both hopelessly out of fashion.

The more immediate difficulty was the physical distance they had to cover, retracing the steps of somebody several times removed from them in the past, a woman who’d left little enough impression on the ground she’d walked across — “No more footprint than a fly,” as Spengler observed — and whose comings and goings went unremarked for the most part by the various other pilgrims she met in her passage.

They picked up her trail in Buffalo Lake, a slim trace it was agreed, without telling particulars but sufficient to lead them south to Nazareth and from there to Spade. A chance encounter sent them up Blackwater Draw to Ochiltree, once a cattle camp serving the Goodnight-Loving Trail, but now a ghost town abandoned to the elements. They doubled back, bearing east toward the Salt Fork of the Brazos. The settlements were fewer, desolate and mean, each less prepossessing than the last, and the cribs more verminous as Sally slipped down the rungs of her profession. They ran an aging madam to earth who recalled mention of a daughter in the few confidences Sally shared with her, but the old bawd had no idea where or in what circumstances the girl had been left.

On their way north again, they passed through Veronica, where it seemed convenient to stay the night before pushing on, and when they stabled the horse at the livery they were told of the late Mrs. Abercrombie. Had the sad event not still been fresh in people’s minds, they wouldn’t have heard about it at all, nor attached any significance to the story.

A wood-frame house, it had burned to the ground, the old woman inside it. She was retired, of course, long past the age when she could handle the demands of children. A lucky thing that she lived alone, if unlucky for her. Such mishaps were all too common. The flue in the coal oil stove was faulty, most like, so the heat built up inside the walls before the fire kindled, and when it took light, the place went all at once, in a sudden burst like phosphor.

“An orphanage at one time, you say?” Placido Geist asked the liveryman, glancing sidelong at Spengler.

But whatever record of her charges Mrs. Abercrombie had kept were lost in the fire, they learned, and although they’d only just happened on her name and hadn’t known to interview her, it was still an opportunity missed. They’d already left too many stones unturned.

Deliverance comes in unexpected guises, Rose discovered. She was fifteen when her pregnancy damned her for good and all. An arrangement was concluded, her keeper being nothing if not resourceful, and the unwanted child disposed of. Rose was discarded as well, her disgrace complete, to make her own way in the world.

Fortune favors the bold, it’s been said, and Rose was enterprising enough to seize the occasion. Cast off, she was easy prey, she realized, but knew her own strengths, and she determined immediately not to be taken advantage of. She hitched up with a confidence artist named Trotter, a fixture on the medicine show circuit, giving him to understand she would reward him with her favors in exchange for his protection. Trotter was satisfied with the bargain and all the more easily led, like most men, believing himself her master. He passed Rose off as his ward, given her age, so as not to outrage convention. She participated in the fiction while it suited her, and when it no longer did, some months later, she allowed a minister’s wife in Bent Grass to force the secret from her gently, her glee masked by the pretense of shame. Trotter, not a complete fool, took to his heels and escaped a severe hiding or worse at the hands of the local vigilance committee, but he made his escape without money or means, Rose having expediently looted his cash box and possibles. She already had her eye on the next prize.

Bent Grass, the county seat, had been incorporated only nine years before with the coming of the railroad. The springs, which fed a branch of the upper Colorado, had been known to the Comanche and to buffalo hunters, and later to ranchers, before attracting farmers who planted cotton and grain. Chief among the stockmen was Ansel Pym, who had settled the country in the early days, fighting Indians and rustlers and making good his claim on enormous holdings. Old Ansel was now well into his eighties, the tenacious relic of a notoriously bloodier time. His son Desmond had died of the cholera, but Des had left a son of his own, and Young Ansel was his grandfather’s heir. The boy wasn’t cut from the same cloth as the old man, being generally regarded as a spoiled brat, an indiscriminate womanizer with a vicious streak, but this estimation of his character was seldom voiced, Old Ansel not being a man to answer discourtesy with soft speech.

Rose had suffered herself to be taken under the wing of the minister and his wife. She knew of the younger Pym’s prospects, as who in that windswept country didn’t, and she arranged an introduction, seemingly in passing. They met at a church bazaar, Young Ansel forehandedly corralled into an appearance, grudging the need. The obverse of exercising his proprietary droit du seigneur was to live up to other, more boring feudal obligations. He enjoyed playing the mikado and dispensing favor but resented having to pretend to a common interest with dirt farmers. He usually oiled himself up as thoroughly as possible in anticipation of such dreary events, exhibiting a glazed and belligerent drunkenness as proof of his indifference. He was unprepared to be smitten by the lively young girl presented by the minister’s wife and lost for a moment his natural arrogance.

Rose, just shy of sixteen, had flowered. She was both coltish and sly, with a lopsided smile that suggested doubtful innocence. Young Ansel felt the promise of heat and warmed to the task. For her part, Rose recognized the predator in him at first blush and was undeceived by his attentions. But she yielded to them, enough to keep her fish on the line and set the hook. She read him clearly enough to see that he was as wayward and unscrupulous as she was. He needed a touch of the spur, she thought to herself. With luck and the judicious exercise of cruelty, he could be brought to heel. It would take careful management, and she mustn’t lose patience, but in the end she would be his wife, a fact as certain to her as that of her clouded birth. When her husband came into possession of his inheritance, she would assume her rightful mantle and become undisputed mistress of Pitchfork, richest estancia in the far reaches of West Texas, without the penalty of the past to haunt her.

It was three weeks now since they’d buried the Dutchman, and they felt no closer to finding his daughter than they had the day they filled in the grave.

“I’m inclined to think we’ve discharged any indemnity,” Spengler said, easing his bulk wearily in the seat. “No fair man would reproach us for putting paid to this.”

“No fair man,” Placido Geist agreed. The dead don’t play fair, he might have remarked. They saddle us with undertakings not easily requited. He gathered in the reins and clucked at the spent horse, coaxing her to pick up her feet. They could make out the town across the dusty flats, some few miles distant in the dusk. It didn’t look like much.

“Sorry excuse for a town,” Spengler said, by way of conversation.

They’d made inquiries at the army post. Soldiers were on familiar terms with whores as a rule, but for some reason the troopers were surly and reticent, unwilling to say much.

“You get the feeling they weren’t telling us something?” Spengler asked.

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, Placido Geist thought, rehearsing the General Confession. There is no health in us.

“You’re mighty pensive,” Spengler said, rather put out.

“I was considering sin,” Placido Geist said.

“You had much occasion for weaknesses of the flesh lately?” Spengler asked him.

Placido Geist smiled ruefully. “Gluttony, perhaps,” he said.

Spengler straightened his leg. “You opine those soldier boys are ashamed of their carnal appetites?” he asked.

“Most men can be shamed,” Placido Geist said.

Spengler was irritated with the bounty hunter’s gnomic replies, which were more opaque than no answer at all. “Spit it out, damn you,” he said. “Don’t talk in riddles.”

Placido Geist glanced over at him, Spengler’s vehemence taking him by surprise. He’d always thought the man taciturn and slow to rile, never sudden.

“Excuse me,” Spengler said, ill at ease with his own unfocused anger and abashed at his sharp words.

“No injury meant,” Placido Geist said.

Spengler sighed and massaged his sore knee. He’d taken to wearing lace-up brogues in recent years instead of the boots with underslung heels he’d always favored in the past. The flat soles were easier on his feet than something made to fit a stirrup, now that he no longer rode with any facility or eagerness. “Few sins gall a man’s pride more than his own presumption,” he said, speaking as if to himself.

“Sometimes a man bites off more than he can chew,” Placido Geist admitted. “We took on the Dutchman’s endeavor because it suited us to think we had honest pretext.”

Spengler nodded morosely. “And so far we’ve got nothing to show for our pains,” he said. “Two old fools on a fool’s errand as you called it. We figured to do our best, but our best hasn’t been near good enough.”

Placido Geist studied him unblinking. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Spengler muttered. “I never counted on becoming a garrulous bore, not if I lived past four score year and ten. I don’t imagine you’d discourage me from keeping my thoughts private.”

Placido Geist had left his own doubts unvoiced for the most part, but they were still distracting.

“There’s nothing to be gained by denying the obvious,” he observed.

“Or in anticipating setbacks,” Spengler said.

“Let’s see what we turn up,” Placido Geist told him.

They paid a courtesy call at the jail. They found the constable on duty to be affable, but not, as Spengler put it afterward, the sharpest knife in the drawer. There had been a recent murder, and the man was well beyond his depth. The victim was of no consequence, he was quick to relate, a woman of easy virtue, but the crime was disturbing in itself. The usual offenses were no more serious than disturbing the peace or creating a public nuisance, this last a euphemism for relieving one’s bladder in plain view. Spengler and Placido Geist were sympathetic and asked the details, less from any real interest than out of a politic show of manners, and so learned of Sally Bledsoe’s death. They were a day late and a dollar short.

She’d been buried in Boot Hill, without ceremony, and there was only a scuffed wooden marker sinking into the ground as the loose earth settled. Her name had been burned into the board with a shank of hot iron. It was misspelled BLEDSO. Below that was the present year. Some wit had added a crude caricature in bright yellow crayon underneath, a female stick figure with her legs spread, like the letter M. It was the only bit of color decorating the grave. Spengler knelt down awkwardly and scrubbed it out with the sleeve of his coat. Placido Geist helped him slowly to his feet again. Neither man met the other’s eyes.

They walked back from the graveyard and stopped at the stables, thinking to examine the room out back that Sally had died in, but they didn’t have much stomach for it. Nobody had taken notice of her absence, and she’d been dead two days in the heat before the stableman thought to look in on her. The smell still clung despite efforts to bleach it out, and the place was altogether cheap and forlorn in any case. They regarded it sadly from just beyond the open doorway, not stepping inside. Sally had lived a joyless and brutish life and died in like fashion. There was no remedy for it.

“This is a hard piece of luck,” Spengler remarked.

“We seem to be getting more than our due,” Placido Geist said to him, his cast of mind inward and speculative.

“We’re not the only ones,” Spengler said.

They looked at each other. They both knew the road they were going down, and they’d reached a fork.

“You’re thinking about the woman who ran that orphanage, back in Veronica,” Placido Geist said. “Burned to death.”

“And now Sally,” Spengler said. “Her neck broken. It’s somewhat previous, considering we got a late start.”

Placido Geist nodded. “Somebody’s been over this ground before us,” he said. “Covering the tracks.”

The curiously faceless man had a name, which was Messenger. To others in the trade he was known as Handsome Andy, but it was something of a joke, so few people being acquainted with his features. There was no likeness of him to circulate, and descriptions of his appearance never tallied. He arranged his commissions through an intermediary, a lawyer in San Antonio who limited his practice to the repair of indiscretions large and small and sold his services dear. Messenger had been well paid for executing this assignment, the job requiring considerable legwork.

Now he sat on the verandah of a small transient hotel in Odessa, putting his thoughts in order. He was recently arrived from the town of Muleshoe, where he’d found nobody with any memory of the Hutterite couple who once owned a tannery there, using otherwise unwanted children as labor, bound over for the work of curing hides until they reached majority in exchange for coarse provender, an iron bedstead, hand-me-down clothes, and rudimentary schooling. Messenger admired the efficacy of the enterprise on the whole, but he was somewhat affronted by its complete shamelessness.

He was certainly no sentimentalist, however, and his sympathies, such as they were, lay in the present. He was giving careful reflection to the wording of a telegram, not a report to the attorney but a direct communication with the client. It was a breach of professional etiquette Messenger regretted, although it seemed the only sure way. He couldn’t trust a third party.

BREEDING STOCK SECURED. ALL OTHER BIDDERS OUT OF THE RUNNING. WILL FORWARD NECESSARY DOCUMENTS FOR YOUR APPROVAL AND PROVIDE AUTHENTICATION.

He was amused by that last touch, a glancing blow, the silken whisper of threat suggesting there were damaging materials as yet to be delivered.

His attention wandered. The hotel was built pueblo-style out of stuccoed adobe brick, the cut ends of the heavy vigas projecting through the outer walls at parapet height. He noticed a line of tiny ants climbing the stucco, and looking closer he saw there were hundreds of them, an army in miniature marching up and down the wall. He couldn’t imagine the generalship of such a campaign, the effort, the immeasurable distances, no end in sight. It put him in mind of Aztec pyramid builders, steadfast in their exalted mystery.

GO TO THE ANT, THOU SLUGGARD! No, he didn’t like that. It wouldn’t do to quote Scripture anyway, not under the circumstances. Keep it simple. Plain speaking, brisk and businesslike, the syntax uncluttered, four-square and serviceable as a handshake. SELLER READY TO DEAL. SUGGEST YOU MAKE SERIOUS OFFER. This was the tricky part, what price to name. Blackmail called for a delicate touch.

“What did the Dutchman die of?” Spengler asked. “I don’t recall your saying.”

“Pleurisy, I was told,” Placido Geist said. “Prison did his lungs no benefit.”

Spengler nodded. “Bad diet, penitentiary food.”

“Rancid meat, no decent vegetables or fresh fruit. It’s surprising he lasted as long as he did.”

It was unlikely any suspicion would attach to the Dutchman’s death, but it couldn’t be altogether discounted. If there were a pattern to the other deaths, the Dutchman’s came to look equally fortuitous.

“Do we have reason to believe Sally ever told anybody the name of the girl’s father?” Placido Geist asked, thinking out loud.

“She told the Dutchman,” Spengler said.

“It might have been a misguided kindness,” Placido Geist remarked.

“How so?”

“A man serving a twenty-year sentence for manslaughter would likely take comfort in knowing there was something left behind to remember him by,” Placido Geist said.

“You presuppose this act of kindness to be Sally’s.”

Placido Geist looked at him in surprise. “A whore is no less Christian in her actions for being a whore,” he said.

Spengler turned and gazed out the window of the railway coach, his thoughts intemperate. He didn’t want them read on his face. “I meant no disparagement,” he said gruffly.

Placido Geist let it pass. He had little wish to trespass on another man’s privacy. His own thoughts were at odds with themselves, adrift on opposing currents.

“Would she have written him in prison, do you think?”

Placido Geist wondered about that himself. “Prison mail is read and censored before being passed on,” he said.

“There was no such letter in the Dutchman’s effects.”

“Unless someone took it, as convincing evidence.”

Spengler was silent again. The scrub of the Llano Estacado rolled by beside the tracks, stunted piñon and juniper flattened into ungainly shapes by the scouring wind. Dust devils spun across the cracked earth, and sand hissed against the carriage windows, sifting in past the rattling transoms.

Who profits? Placido Geist asked himself.

The problem lay in assigning a motive. The one common thread was the orphan girl, passed from hand to hand with no surviving chronicle of her bumpy itinerary. The only person who knew the stages of her journey with any certainty was Sally’s daughter herself if she were still alive, and that spurred his mind in a direction he jibed away from like a horse refusing the bit. He felt the Dutchman’s charge, meant to redress an unredeemed wrong, had less auspiciously opened a can of worms. He realized it was a mistake to hold himself responsible for events he couldn’t control — it was self-serving, in fact, an old man’s immodesty — but he couldn’t shake the notion that he and Spengler were somehow being used in the office of bellwether, a plough turning the soil, with the husbandman of death treading the furrows behind them. He tried to shrug off this fantastical presentiment, reminding himself that the Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape, playing to our most favored conceits, but it unsettled him nonetheless. If they were the instrument of another, all unwitting, and yet managed to discover the girl’s whereabouts through some coincidence or stroke of chance, they’d have led the assassin right to her.

“Pitchfork,” Spengler said, breaking into his reverie.

They were traveling south from Lubbock to the junction at Big Spring, where they could board the through train to El Paso. The right-of-way cut across the northeast corner of the Pym spread, Old Ansel having granted an casement to the Rio Grande railroad and their assigns in return for a freight stop on his own land for shipping cattle. Feedlots flanked the sidings, platforms, and loading chutes built up next to the tracks. The famous boxed brand was burned into the fence posts at regular intervals, as if there were any need to advertise ownership, the fortunes of the family being so widely known.

“They say the old man still rode out to check his stock, winter and summer,” Spengler remarked.

Placido Geist nodded. “Died in a fall from his horse, I believe, a year or so back,” he said.

“You knew him?”

“Knew of him,” Placido Geist said. “How not?”

“I’ve heard the boy hasn’t proved the old man’s get, the blood thinner, two generations removed,” Spengler said.

“A truant disposition by most reports.”

“He married a girl of no family, it’s said. Chaste but undowered. His grandfather can’t have been pleased.”

Placido Geist shook his head, smiling. “Ansel Pym had dynastic ambitions to be sure,” he said. “Nor was he a man in any wise to be crossed. But in like manner he put little store by the good opinion of lesser mortals.”

Spengler sighed. “You take too practical a view,” he said. “And overly scrupulous. Why spoil a story for lack of the facts?”

“A fabrication can’t be at odds with the facts,” Placido Geist said. “Old Ansel judged a man by his worth, much the same way you look first at a horse’s teeth, and he was no fool about horses, either. He wouldn’t refuse his consent to such a marriage if the girl were of good character.”

“And if she weren’t?”

Placido Geist shrugged.

“The proof is in the pudding,” he said. “The old man could have forbidden the match, but he didn’t. It speaks for itself.”

Spengler subsided. He would’ve gone on, volunteering instructive examples of many an honest rustic led to grief by some adventuress, like a calf to the gelding, but Placido Geist seemed to have lost interest. In this Spengler misread his man, as his speculations opened up the very train of argument the bounty hunter had avoided.

Who profits? he’d wondered. One possibility was all too plain. Sally’s daughter might have risen in the world and left her past behind her, perhaps marrying a man of property and reputation. But if that past were exposed, she risked losing all her gains. It was simple enough. Erase the evidence and the past became a blank book. She could write her own history, could make it eventful or unremarkable, whatever she desired, with no one to correct or accuse her, none to bear witness. If that meant murder, to burn yesterday’s soiled pages to ashes and secure the present against mischief or reversal, then murder would be readily done. No longer a victim of circumstance but still hostage to fortune, she was only protecting her investment.

Rose Pym had never lacked for invention. She’d invented herself, after all. Marriage, she soon discovered, needed a steady diet of sham, or hers did anyway, so it didn’t matter practically whether others had made a better bargain. She contrived a pregnancy early, which strengthened her position, but even before the boy Desmond was born, she found an ally in Old Ansel, who was by no means blind to his grandson’s faults. The old man respected ambition, and recognizing it in Rose, he encouraged her to take on more of his own burden, reposing in her both his confidence and his authority. She was saddened by his death, as it meant she had to exercise that authority over both the ranch and her husband. While he was alive, the old man had kept Young Ansel’s excesses in check, but with his grandfather dead, the new patron demanded a submission from his retainers that the old man had earned and he had not. Like most weaklings Ansel was a bully, and Rose knew the hands spoke of her husband behind his back with contempt. They called him borracho — drunkard — and made fun of his pretensions. Rose understood ridicule was dangerous. It made for bad discipline. She saw the men grow insolent and mutinous and knew their disdain for Ansel could rub off on her. She determined to win them over, realizing she’d set herself no easy task.

Leaving the infant Desmond in the care of his wet nurse, she embarked on her new enterprise. It meant rising early, wearing men’s clothing, riding out in all seasons and in all weather, just as Old Ansel had done, making it her business to learn the men and equipment, the terrain, and the animals.

The great herds of beef no longer grazed on open range, but the fenced pasturage was enormous. She often slept in the saddle or on the ground and went days without a bath. She drank thick, scalding coffee at line camps, swallowed dust on the trail, went wet in sudden storms, and never complained for herself, always taking time to listen to complaints from the working cowboys. They humored her at first, thinking she only amused herself, and then came grudgingly to admire her interest and stamina.

Rose was careful not to undermine her husband, but inside six months it was common knowledge who held the reins. Ansel was tolerated, his habitual drunkenness blunting any interference with actual ranching, and the outfit recovered its self-respect. Rose signed the contracts and managed the accounts, and she was regarded privately as Old Ansel’s real legatee.

She had good reason to be proud, but she knew better than to court complacency. And despite her precautions, when true hazard presented itself, it came on her blind side.

“Well, the worm turns,” a voice said familiarly.

She’d just stepped off the raised sidewalk and was about to mount the buckboard. He spoke from a little behind her and to the left. She glanced over her shoulder into the street. He had his back to the sun, and it took her a moment to recognize him. It was Trotter.

He lifted his hat and smiled at her politely, showing off his manners, but she didn’t doubt the courtesy was ironic.

“I heard you’d done well for yourself,” he said, moving slightly closer so as to speak quietly but not close enough to give offense. “I see I heard right.” She could smell his mail-order cologne, thick and sweet, and the faint odor of naphtha on his woolen suit.

“Cat got your tongue?” he inquired provokingly.

Rose looked up at him with a steady and alert gaze, neither fearful nor shy. If anything, she was disappointed in him. This was no chance encounter.

Trotter dropped his eyes, at a loss. He’d obviously rehearsed himself, but he seemed to have forgotten his lines. She waited for him to gather his faculties. “The thought of tar and feathers doesn’t improve a man’s disposition,” he told her.

“It might work wonders for your appearance,” she said.

“You did me an injury,” he said, with a flash of temper.

“You seem none the worse for wear.”

Trotter stifled his anger. “I’ve a proposition I’d like to put to you,” he said.

“I can well imagine,” Rose said, her amusement bitter.

“Is there a place we could discuss it?”

“I have no wish to be seen with you,” she said.

“You’re making this disagreeable.”

“How would it be otherwise?” she asked him. “Fine words butter no parsnips. Name your price and be done with it.”

Her directness took him by surprise. He wanted to twist the knife a little. Rose wasn’t having any. “I’m not going to stand out in the street, damn you,” she said, fiercely. “Speak up or give way.”

Trotter had been of two minds whether to approach her at all, but her intransigence decided him. He was not to be discarded like a failed suitor, he insisted, nor would he be satisfied with a token payment. He demanded a stipend, a set reward on a fixed schedule, mortgaging his silence.

Rose heard him out and agreed.

They came to an understanding that the money would be delivered by hand and in secret. Trotter was pleased with himself. He thought it a handsome accommodation, of mutual benefit. He said so.

Rose refused his pleasantries. This was no occasion for social graces. She felt an urge to throw up.

Trotter looked up the street. With the railroad bringing in trade and disposable goods, Bent Grass was no longer a sleepy prairie cowtown but a place of opportunity, keeping pace with the changing times. Soon the rutted roadway would give way to pavement, the wooden storefronts to brick, the gas fixtures to electric. “This is a likely spot to slake a claim,” Trotter remarked to Rose. “We could have both chosen less happily.” He smiled like a conspirator.

She swallowed her rising gorge.

“Don’t be a nuisance,” she said. “You’re unwelcome here, make no mistake. Whatever our commerce, we’ll conclude it at a distance.”

“I wouldn’t leave it too long,” he advised her.

“No,” Rose told him. “I’ll send someone.”

And send someone she did.

“How many killings?” the judge asked.

“Who can say? Two that we know of, or anyway suspect. There might be a half dozen more.” Placido Geist studied his whisky morosely, turning the glass between his hands. “Not that it matters much. There’s little chance we can bring the murderer to book.”

On his infrequent trips to Austin, Placido Geist always took the time to visit with Judge Lamar. They enjoyed each other’s company and yarned together over a whisky or a game of chess. Placido Geist had told the story, and twice the judge had gone to the sideboard to refill their glasses. Now that the meat of the tale was told, Lamar was chewing on the bones. Versed in the rules of evidence, he found the other man’s argument unpersuasive legally, but experience told him the bounty hunter wouldn’t chase a false scent.

“It’s mostly smoke,” Placido Geist said. “Everything at secondhand, gossip or hearsay, none of it solid.”

“I take your point,” the judge said, “although we’re not in front of a jury.”

“Even in Texas juries are loath to hang a woman.”

Lamar shrugged. “The injustice was done that girl by her birth and no fault of her own,” he said. “How do we know what other wrongs were done her, each following from the first? She’s led a gypsy life.”

Placido Geist smiled without humor. “Is this your line of defense?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s wholly inadequate for a capital crime,” Lamar said. “Then again, which of us is pure in heart?”

Placido Geist sketched the air with his hand, a gesture of acquiescence. “I admit my reasons are selfish,” he told the judge. “I don’t know the name she was born with or what name she goes by now. I doubt whether I could find her if I tried any harder. Nor am I dead certain that I’m right about this. It’s too slippery to grasp.”

“You’d like to be sure, one way or another.”

“Every act has consequences, but not necessarily those we foresee,” Placido Geist said. “I took the Dutchman’s shilling in the hope I could lay his ghost to rest, but I succeeded only in disturbing other ghosts out of the unquiet past. It does me no distinction.”

“This is churlishness,” Lamar said shortly.

Placido Geist was stung by the reproach, but he realized the judge hadn’t intended a gratuitous insult.

“We all look for resolutions,” Lamar said. “Something neat, a means of satisfaction, or even redemption. But that instinct runs counter to the rule of entropy, the natural reign of chaos. We try to impose order, discipline, a sense of fitness, because it suits our vanity to think we are the measure of destiny, that man is made in the image of God, with mastery over the brute forms of the earth and over our own narrative, as if history weren’t messy, accidental, and arbitrary. You can’t blame yourself for failing in a responsibility when there’s no reckoning.”

“Does that absolve us?” Placido Geist asked him.

Lamar snorted. “The mark of a criminal is not that he breaks the law but that he feels it doesn’t apply to him and other men are fools not to simply take what they require or deserve,” the judge said. “The criminal doesn’t consider what’s lost in the transaction. An outlaw, in the original sense, isn’t just someone trying to escape penalty but a man who’s placed himself beyond legal protection. There’s your choice. An honest man owns up to his responsibilities not from fear of censure but because he understands the limits of the social compact. We accept this construct, this common fiction, as a convenience.”

“You contradict yourself,” Placido Geist told him. “You say on the one hand that man’s endeavors are no more than a tissue of futility and on the other that we owe ourselves an accounting. Which do you believe?”

“Where’s the contradiction?” Lamar asked. “I say only that this evident artifice keeps misrule at bay. Most of us have very little patience with ambiguity or mixed results. We like our answers straight, our oracles unclouded. We ask for a simple table of elements — earth, air, fire, water — or an easy calculus to explain the Furies that drive us.”

“You make it too abstract,” Placido Geist said.

“Very well,” the judge said. “In plain English, that whore’s child has slipped through your fingers. You have lost very few bounties over the years, a point of some pride, and this shabby business is left at loose ends.”

“She’ll cheat the noose,” Placido Geist pointed out.

Lamar sighed. “She won’t be the first, nor will she be the last,” he said. “Any more than some innocent might stand in for her on the scaffold, and without prejudice.”

The bounty hunter thought this rather a startling admission for a man retired from the bench, but he chose not to pursue it. In his time Lockjaw Lamar had sent more than a few men to the hangman, and if he’d doubted their guilt, this was the first Placido Geist had heard of it.

They set out the chess pieces, and their talk turned to other things. Politics, of course, a staple of Judge Lamar’s discourse and the reason he kept his residence in the state capital. Men they’d known, both good and bad, most of them dead now and the few still living a reminder of their own obstinate durability. The passing of time and the nature of memory. The changes that had overtaken both themselves and the country in a single lifetime.

It wasn’t all old man’s talk about the past by any means. The judge kept his ear to the ground and enjoyed a bit of current scandal.

There was a recent case in West Texas, a woman found in a hotel room with a man not her husband. Adultery was not at issue, as she’d shot him stone dead when he presumed on her virtue. She was handsomely acquitted of manslaughter at her trial, having a skillful lawyer and the sympathy of the jury on her side, and the fact that she was married to a man of considerable property did her no harm. The few questions that lingered after the verdict were put to rest by her obvious composure, startling in one so young.

“Mrs. Ansel Pym,” Lamar told him in answer to his question. “Child chatelaine of Pitchfork.”

“Ah,” Placido Geist said. He remembered Spengler’s comment about the girl. “Chaste but undowered.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. Who was the man in her hotel room?”

“The dead man was identified as one Messenger, a villain of some reputation,” Lamar said.

Placido Geist nodded. “He was known as Handsome Andy,” he said. “A jack of all trades, they say, but a proper brigand. I’d always heard nobody knew what he looked like.”

“Curiously enough, her lawyer did,” the judge said. “He defended him years ago on a forgery charge.”

“Did he get him off?” Placido Geist asked, smiling.

“Yes, he did. We’re talking about Johnny Beauchamp out of San Antonio, a man who never takes the losing side.”

“Speaking of villains of some reputation,” Placido Geist remarked, without malice.

“The fellow’s a scoundrel, no question,” Lamar said. “I wonder he didn’t employ Messenger himself in some capacity.”

“If he had, the Pym woman did him a service,” Placido Geist said. “Handsome Andy might have embarrassed any number of people had he ever been put in the witness box.”

Lamar chuckled. “Dead men tell no tales,” he said.

“I wonder what brought them together.”

“Ranch business, or that was his pretext for meeting with her,” the judge said. “Apparently she keeps the pursestrings and wears the pants as well. Her husband is a hopeless drunk, not to put too fine a point on it.”

“And she holds the prize,” Placido Geist said.

Lamar put the chessmen back in position on the board. They’d won a game apiece. Lamar picked up a white pawn and a black one and put his hands behind his back.

Handsome Andy would have been there to sell, not buy, Placido Geist thought. He wasn’t in the cattle business, and surely rape wasn’t on his mind.

The judge held his clenched hands out, a pawn in each. The white pawn moved first.

The richest spread in West Texas, and now it was hers. He reached out and tapped Lamar’s left hand. Lamar opened it and showed him the black pawn. Placido Geist sat forward. He’d be a move behind for the rest of the game, and he couldn’t afford a mistake, not if he wanted to win.

Then again, he reasoned, neither could she.