Longarm and "Kid" Bodie (9781101622001) (10 page)

Chapter 17

“Well, here we are,” Longarm said, stepping down from the stagecoach in Virginia City. “Twenty years ago this place was a magnet for every starry-eyed dreamer and gold-fevered prospector in the world.”

Bodie climbed out of the stagecoach. His dog had not been allowed inside, so Homer had trotted after the coach all the way from Reno. He still looked fresh, and because the weather was cool, Homer hadn't suffered.

“The cemetery is out there,” Longarm said, pointing to the east. “Would you like to see if we can find your mother's grave?”

Bodie just nodded his head.

“All right, let's stretch our legs, and I'm sure that it won't be hard to find the gravesites of your mother and her husband.”

Longarm's prediction proved correct. In less than thirty minutes, they were standing in front of two impressive headstones and what were clearly recently dug graves. There were even some wilted flowers strewn across Ruby's raised mound of dirt.

“I'll just wander around for a few minutes, and when you're done here, let out a shout and we'll go back into town and get rooms.”

“Yes, sir.”

Longarm had always had a bit of a fascination for graveyards. He wasn't morbid about them, but he liked reading the epitaphs, always hoping he could get a little insight into the person who was lying still and cold almost under his feet. As he wandered around the cemetery, he saw that the graves dated back to 1860, which was right around the time that the Comstock Lode ore had first been discovered. The town itself had been named after James “Old Virginny” Fennimore, and the story was that in 1859 “Old Virginny” had gotten roaring drunk and ridden up Gold Canyon only to topple off his horse and smash his last bottle of whiskey. Staggering to his feet, he had the great presence of mind to brush himself off, survey the dark stain of his bad whiskey, and shout to his equally drunken companions, “There dammit, I have just christened this place in my own gall-darned honor as Virginia City!”

Longarm didn't know if that was a true story or not, but he sure thought it was a good one.

“I'm ready now,” Bodie said, joining him. “There are a lot of graves here.”

“Yes. And most of them belong to Welsh hard-rock miners, and the main cause of their death was pneumonia.”

“Why is that?”

“I'm far from an expert on deep, hard-rock mining, but I do know that some of these mines went a thousand feet deep. And that far down the temperature is very hot . . . maybe as hot as one hundred and fifty degrees. I'm told that the miner's union made sure that its members were paid three dollars a day and received a hundred pounds of ice per shift in those deepest and hottest levels.”

“It must have been like working down in hell,” Bodie opined.

“I think it was,” Longarm agreed. “But three dollars a day was double what a cowboy would make and more than I make today as a federal marshal, so there were always men willing to risk their lives. But when they were brought up in cages dangling from cables, they were often overheated, and when they were hit by icy winter blasts, it was almost a certainty that they would catch pneumonia, and that's why so many died young up here on the Comstock Lode, so far away from their families.”

Bodie nodded with understanding. “They have plenty of gold mines in Bodie, but none that go more than a hundred feet underground. I vowed I'd never work down in a deep mine. I'd rather shovel horseshit than risk being buried alive.”

“I agree,” Longarm said. “I remember reading that Dan DeQuille, a famous reporter who worked here on the
Territorial Enterprise
, said that if all the Comstock Lode mines were linked up in a straight line, they would stretch from here to San Francisco.”

Bodie blinked with surprise. “Do you really believe that?”

“I do. Hard-rock miners been digging underneath our feet for over twenty-five years, and the earth below is now riddled with caverns and tunnels. I was told once that some of the bigger mines, like the Ophir, were so extensive that a person could get lost and wander around for weeks.”

“My mother has a real nice headstone and so does her husband. Side by side. I'm glad I got to visit this cemetery, but I never want to return.”

“That's perfectly understandable,” Longarm assured the boy. “Now, let's go find a room and get something to eat.”

As they walked back into town, Bodie asked, “How are you going to start findin' out who murdered my ma and her husband?”

“I'm going to do what I always do,” Longarm replied. “I'll go by the newspaper office and read their past issues on the deaths. I'll also belly-up at bars and casually ask questions. The thing of it is, Bodie, most people fear death but they hold a fascination for it and want to talk endlessly about it. I'll go from one place and person to another and I'll find out plenty.”

“I'd like to see where their mansion stood, even if it is just a pile of ashes.”

“All right. We can visit it tomorrow.”

“I'd rather visit it right away.”

“Okay, just as soon as we get rooms and something to eat. I'm so hungry I could eat a sow and nine piglets and then chase their boar a half mile.”

“Ha!” Bodie cried. “That's pretty danged hungry all right.”

* * * 

They had no trouble finding rooms cheap, because business was so poor; the dinner they ate didn't cost very much either, considering its quantity and quality.

When they walked out of the restaurant, Longarm said, “Bodie, that meal for both of us cost only seventy-five cents. When Virginia City was booming, a meal like that would have cost two dollars or more.”

“Two dollars?”

“That's right. Everything costs more than it should in a boomtown. But now that its bust, the prices have gotten cheap.”

“Let's go find the burned down mansion,” Bodie said.

They found the ruins of the Burlington Mansion at the very end of A Street, overlooking miles of sagebrush-covered hills and valleys. The only things left standing were two opposing brick chimneys that marked where the master bedroom had stood, at the opposite end of the home from the living room, and a collapsed and heat-twisted iron staircase now leading to nowhere. There was evidence that some effort had been made by the local volunteer fire department to save the mansion, but the fire must have spread so quickly and with such intensity that their work had been futile.

“It was a huge house,” Longarm said, as they stood by a stone staircase leading into the rubble. “A showpiece of a home.”

“I wish I'd have been able to go inside it when my ma lived here and seen how fine it was.”

“Yeah,” Longarm said, “she must have been very proud of her new status in life.”

Bodie walked right into the charred rubble. “I wonder if I can find anything important or valuable in all of this.”

“I doubt it,” Longarm told the boy. “There have probably already been some people searching for anything of value.”

“I think I'll poke around all the same.”

“Sure. But if you're going to search through all this, you'll need to take a bath and change clothes before we go out to dinner.”

Bodie didn't hear him. The kid had picked up a piece of blackened iron and begun to poke through the deep bed of ashes.

“Homer, I hope you stay out of there,” Longarm said. “With your thick coat you'd be impossible to clean up if you went in there with Bodie.”

In answer, Homer trotted into the sea of ashes, and when he reached Bodie, he lay down with his head on his paws.

* * * 

Longarm watched the pair for a few moments, then turned and headed back into town. His first stop would be the
Territorial Enterprise
newspaper office and he hoped to meet his old friend the reporter Dan DeQuille.

“No,” the editor, whose name was Paul Elder, replied, “Dan has taken a short vacation and gone up to Lake Tahoe. I had to practically fire the man to get him to leave here for a few restful days. Dan really needed a break because being a newspaper reporter in a dying town isn't easy or pleasant work. Everyone up here is desperate, and all they talk about is when one of the few operating mines might make a big strike to get the money flowing again.”

“Do you really expect that to happen?”

“No,” Elder admitted, “I don't. This isn't the first mining town I've opened a newspaper in, and it probably won't be the last. But I'm still eking out a living and paying my bills, so I'll hang on until the very end . . . just like Dan. You know, I love this city, and I just can't stand to give up and abandon her to die.”

“I admire your perseverance but question your good sense.”

“I'm an old-time, died-in-the-wool newspaper editor, and instead of blood my veins flow with ink,” the man said with a wry smile. “Nobody gets rich in this business, and you're always rocking the boat to keep up reader interest, so you make a lot of enemies. Did you know that the last editor down in Bodie wrote such an inflammatory article that the man who felt his name was tarnished charged into the newspaper office down there and shot the Bodie editor dead?”

“I wasn't aware of that.”

“It happens all the time! If you only write good and happy stories and never criticize or point out corruption and injustice, pretty soon nobody wants to read your rag. But if you attack people and constantly stir the pot, people hang on your every word and some get mad enough to kill.”

“Maybe you should write a book.”

The editor, a tall, thin man in his early sixties, with gray muttonchop whiskers, laughed. “I
am
writing a book! One about wild Indians and brave cavalry soldiers and damsels in distress. And you know what?”

“What?”

“I'll bet my hack fiction sells a whole lot more copies than my newspaper.”

They both laughed, and then Longarm said, “I'm here to investigate the Burlington murders and the torching of their mansion.”

“Why?” Elder asked with his characteristic bluntness. “You're a
federal
marshal and this isn't a federal issue.”

“It became one when United States Marshal Hugh Parker got involved and then was murdered for his trouble.”

Elder raised a bony finger to the ceiling. “Oh, yes! Marshal Parker was found beaten to death behind a saloon down in Reno.”

“That's right.”

“And you think,” the editor asked, “that the Burlington murders and the fatal beating of Marshal Parker are somehow . . . related?”

“I'm almost certain of it.”

The editor of the
Territorial Enterprise
rubbed his pointy chin, and his eyes began to dance with excitement. “I'm feeling that maybe we've got a great story here! How about we go have a couple of beers and you tell me everything you know? I'll write a fine piece on it and it will stir the pot up to a boil.”

“I'd rather you told me everything you know and think might have happened regarding the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Burlington and then I do some legwork. When the time comes, I'll be happy to tell you what I've found out and hopefully that I'm ready to make an arrest.”

Paul Elder deflated a little but nodded. “All right. Let's go into my office where my typesetter can't overhear us. With Dan on vacation I'm the only writer, but I'm between stories . . . in fact, I'm pretty desperate to find any story.”

“I'll give you one,” Longarm promised, “and it'll come pretty soon. But now we need to talk in private.”

Back in the editor's crowded office covered with old newspapers and odds and ends, they found two chairs and sat down across from each other.

“To begin with,” the editor said, “we don't have any law enforcement up here. Our sheriff was laid off, and so when Marshal Parker arrived one day out of the blue to investigate the murders, everyone was surprised and happy. The Burlingtons, especially Chester, were much admired because they were generous in giving to the local charities.”

“Go on.”

“My first impression on the morning after the fire had died down enough to allow people to bring out the charred bodies was that it was an accidental death. Chester Burlington loved his cigars and his drinks. It happens all the time.”

“But then the mortician found bullet holes in the skulls.”

“Yes,” Elder said. “And that changed everything. The town went from mourning over the deaths of two of its most popular citizens into a state of anger and confusion.”

“And suspicion?”

“That too,” Elder admitted. “There were many in this dying town who thought that perhaps the couple had gotten drunk together and into a fight. One or the other killed their spouse, then—filled with sudden remorse—shot themselves.”

“Squarely in the back of their own head?”

Elder shrugged his narrow shoulders. “The bullet holes were small-caliber. Possibly made by a little derringer.” Elder reached behind his own head. “I could do it and so could either one of them.”

“I suppose, but that just doesn't seem likely.”

“No,” the editor agreed, “it doesn't to me either. The most likely cause of death was that someone robbed the pair and shot them and torched their mansion to hide all evidence.”

“And I understand that their safe was hanging open.”

“Yes,” Elder said. “And that supports the murder theory.”

“All right,” Longarm said, “let's assume that one of them did not shoot the other and then shoot themselves. That only leave us with a murderer.”

“That's the way I see it and so did Marshal Parker. He wasn't an easy man to tolerate, that one, but he was smart and he was relentless in pursuit of the truth.”

“I think he found it,” Longarm said, “but before he could act on what he'd found, the true murderer or murderers got to him and tried to make his death appear to be just a common mugging that proved fatal.”